The ULTIMATE Guide to Corporate Headshots! - Gear, Setup, & Execution

Welcome to the Ultimate Corporate Headshot Photography Guide. Today, I'm going to walk you through my process from start to finish. I have a client that I'm going to be meeting in a studio. You're going to be coming with me. We're going to be going through the motions of how I set up my lighting, things that are going through my head when I am shooting these corporate headshots, and then I'm going to bring you back here. We're going to open up Lightroom and Photoshop, and I'm going to actually edit one for you so you can see what I go through to edit these photos and to deliver them to my clients. Professionally, this is something that I lean on heavily because of three main reasons. One, it doesn't take a long time to do. You're not going to be shooting all day. Two, for that time spent, you can make some really good money. And three, headshots are always going to be in demand. The first thing I'm going to talk about is gear. Now, the two lenses that I will definitely recommend to do headshots are an 85mm and a 70-200mm f2.8. You can even use the 70-200mm f4 if you need to because you're really not going to be shooting wide open, but we'll get into that when we get to the studio. For the camera, I am using a Canon R5. You can even get the quality with a crop sensor camera if you have one, but I would highly suggest investing in the glass before your camera body if you decide to invest in anything. So let's talk about lighting. There's no way around it. If you're going to be shooting corporate headshots, you're going to be using off-camera flash. So if you're not used to off-camera flash or you haven't even bought a flash yet, I'm sorry to say, but you're definitely going to need to go ahead and learn that skillset before you can really get good at corporate photography. I'm going to start with the key light first, and the key light is the main light, the light that's going to be responsible for mostly illuminating your subject and bringing the most light to your subject. You can use a different couple of flashes for this so you don't have to go above and beyond. So I'm going to give you some options here. The Godox AD400, it's a powerful strobe. It has 400 watts of power. It gets the job done. Then you have the AD200, which is a smaller little brother of the AD400. You can use the AD200 as your key light. It's definitely strong enough as its own, but if you do want some extra power, I do recommend that you buy another AD200 or you just go ahead and invest in the AD400. And then lastly, you have your speed light. Now, I use these speed lights not for my key light, but usually for a hair rim light or illuminate the background, depending on how I'm taking the corporate headshot. I kind of strayed away from the one light setup for corporate headshot photography. One light is amazing for dramatic, maybe actor headshots, or maybe they just want a cool Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn picture. So let's talk about backdrops and background. When it comes to corporate headshot photography, you'll probably notice that your subjects are always typically against a solid background, most likely white, black, and sometimes they even ask to use a green screen. A lot of corporate headshot photography happens on location, at the business, at the office, at the company. So that means your setup is gonna have to be mobile and you can't be carrying around a big paper backdrop just to do these. So what I love to invest in and what I love are these pop-up backdrops. You can get these on Amazon. This one has two colors, blue and green, on either side. And I use this one for when my clients want a green screen background. Today, we won't be using the green screen. I have another one of these and it's a white side and a black side. I use both equally, depending on what the subject is wearing and what they prefer. And then also, if you have a solid white back wall that you can put your subject in front, that will definitely work as well. But it's definitely good to have these as options because they pop open super easy, they fold close super easy, and all you need is an additional tripod that has a little length to it so that you can hoist it up behind your subject. So the last piece of gear that I'm gonna be talking about is my reflector dish. Now, I don't use the circle one that's just really flat and just an oval. I use the curved one. And I use that because it allows me to put it right in front of my subject without being in the way of the shot. And also, it really works well as far as bouncing that light off of my key light onto my subject's face and really give them a nice catch light in the eyes. I told you what gear that I'm using and what gear that you should be using, so I'm gonna pack up all my stuff and we are gonna get on the road, head over to the studio, meet the client, everything will be set up, and we will be good to go, just in a snap. All right, guys, so we are in the studio now. I have my client here, Alex. She's ready, being patient for us to get started. Now it's time to talk about power and setting up your lights. Typically, when I do my headshot setup, I pretty much put my key light just a couple feet, maybe six feet away from my subject. And you're gonna have a diffuser on here to soften the light, of course. And this is gonna be your strongest light source, all right? The key light is gonna be the highest power. You're gonna have to experiment a little bit. Make sure you take some test shots. But really, if you're using multiple lights, always start with this one first, turn the other two off, and make sure you have this first. This is your foundation, this is everything. The strongest power source is at one-eighth power, so it's pretty strong, but there's a reason why you need to have that, and I'll get into that in a second. The second light over here is also set up. This is also going to be your weakest light source, your rim light. It doesn't need to be strong. It needs to be very subtle. It's just gonna be a pop of light on the back shoulder, on the back of the head to add some dimension. And then down here, this is also gonna be mid-range as far as power level, and this is gonna illuminate your background. You might find this to be a little tricky because it's really about the angle to make sure that you can get a even spread of light across your backdrop. So you may have to experiment with the flash head as far as tilting it down or bringing it up so that the entire background illuminates. Lastly, we're gonna talk about settings of your camera. Now, a lot of portrait photographers, they like to shoot wide open so they get those nice blurry backgrounds. For headshot photography, you don't do that. You need a strong light source because you typically are gonna be shooting between F5.6 to F6.3. I love 6.3 because it allows me to get the entire face of my subject in focus. You might have your subject turn one way or another, and if you're shooting wide open, that means that one eye is gonna be in focus and the other eye is most likely gonna be a little bit blurry. And if they're blowing that picture up for a big publication internally for their corporation or anything like that, that's definitely gonna be noticeable. So you want all the features of the subject's face to be in focus and having a high aperture or a closed aperture, I should say, it's gonna allow you to do that. So 6.3 is definitely a good starting point, but as you can imagine, that's definitely gonna cut your flash power down and it's also gonna cut down the ambient light. So you're gonna have to have a strong key light to cut through that small aperture and really be able to illuminate your subject. ISO is typically at 100 or 125. You don't need a high ISO. And shutter speed for me, depending on the lens, is between 160 and 200. If you're using 85 millimeter, you can do one over 80, but I would go a little faster just to cut down any possible camera shake or motion blur that might happen when you're taking the photo. You're gonna have to pose your subject, make them feel more comfortable. Nothing crazy. You don't need to do any strong poses or anything like that. I do like to ask my clients, what side of their face do they prefer? Some don't have a preference, some absolutely do. So that's something to take note because you want them to be happy with their photos. For headshots, you can do something as my subject is, is sitting down, looking straight at the camera. But what I typically like to do is pay attention to the attire and the hair and the features of my subject and I play to that. So I see that the subject's hair is more covering her face right here. So what I'm gonna do is, is I'm actually gonna have her turn her shoulders this way. Perfect, just like that. And then she's gonna go ahead and look back at the camera. So that's gonna not only show a little bit more of her face, give me more features to capture, but it's also gonna give her a more traditional corporate headshot pose. It's the turn of the shoulders, a straight look into the camera, a beautiful smile. And we're gonna go ahead and see how that works out. So we just took some sample photos and I'll throw it on the actual computer screen so you can see this is straight out of camera, no editing, but this is the end result. We have an even background, we have the catch lights in the eye, everything is in focus. So we're gonna go ahead and continue on. That's a perfect headshot. Now for this, we're also gonna be changing her from sitting to standing. And standing is pretty much the same as when she's sitting, you're just gonna have a little bit taller of a posture. Depending on their height, some clients might have to adjust their light. So what I like to do when we go from sitting to standing, and also when there's a wardrobe change, I like to take a couple of test shots. One, two, three. Great, awesome. Still pops against the background, everything looks the same, so we're gonna go ahead and continue on. And you also wanna make sure that you're adding a little variation. She's giving me big smiles, she's giving me small smiles, because you just wanna be able to give your clients as many options to choose from when you send the proof gallery. And also you can make subtle adjustments to give them a better picture as far as what they're seeing in their eyes. She didn't like the way her hair was sitting on her shoulder, so we made a slight adjustment, and we're gonna go ahead and take some more images. So when she gets her proof gallery, she'll have some good varieties to choose from. One, two, three. Let's do one more half smile this time, there you go. That's beautiful. Yeah. Excellent. We have completed our headshot session in the studio, but the video is not done yet. We have one last step, and that's getting back to the house, saving these photos to the hard drive, and then opening one up in Lightroom and Photoshop and editing them. So you can see how I edit my professional headshots and deliver them to my corporate clients. Alex, thank you so much for being a wonderful client. We'll see you soon. All right guys, so we are at the final step of today's video, and that is editing. So let's go ahead and get started here. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and crop the photo to a typical headshot dimension, four by five, we're gonna get it right there. Next thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna create a mask, and I'm gonna go to background, and we're just gonna go ahead and raise that exposure up just to even it all out. Great. Next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit this plus sign here, select people, and it's going to go here, and I'm gonna create certain masks that I like to edit on corporate headshots. So we're gonna do facial skin, body skin, eye sclera, which is the white of your eyes, iris and pupil, lips, teeth, and hair. That's seven different masks. I'm gonna go ahead and hit create mask, and Lightroom just opens it up. Now, wherever you see the red, that's the part that's being affected. So we're gonna start here. What I like to do is just go to soften skin light in this menu, and I'm actually gonna bring this down to about 70, boom, just like that. Same thing with the neck. Soften skin light down to 70. Eyes, whitening of the eyes, I like to actually use teeth whitening. Does a great job. For the pupil and the iris, what I'm going to do is go down to iris enhance, and then I'm going to turn that down just a little bit. We don't want it looking like an X-Men character, so we're just gonna bring that down just a little bit. Great. And then we're gonna go to lips. I'm just gonna add a little bit more color to lips. I'll go to saturation, boost that up a little bit. Teeth whitening, we're actually gonna use teeth whitening now. And then hair, I'm gonna add a little saturation to the hair, a little boost of color. Perfect. Now if I hit Y on the keyboard, you can see the before and after, and already it looks amazing. You know, Lightroom has really come a long way with their AI technology and the editing, and you can tell that this portrait looks fairly good and pretty edited. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and do some basic general adjustments now, and I'm gonna close the mask option. Then I'm gonna go down here to contrast, gonna give it a little bit of contrast, boost those shadows up just a little bit. Clarity, we're gonna go ahead and bring that over to about 10. Then we're gonna boost the vibrance of the overall picture a little bit. No color grading. Sharpening, go ahead, bring that to about 75. And when you hold the Alt key, you can see what is actually being sharpened. Everything that is white is being sharpened, everything that's black is not. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn that up, just like that, perfect. Now, something that I love about Lightroom is their new denoise feature. It's amazing. This image doesn't have any noise, but it really enhances it, so I still like to use it. It only could be used on raw or DNG files, so if you have a JPEG, it won't be available, and you'll have to use the manual noise reduction down here. But since this is a raw photo, I'm gonna go ahead and click denoise, and it's gonna do its thing. And once it's done enhancing, it'll actually create a virtual copy or a new copy of the photo with the enhancements, and you'll still have the previous photo before you actually hit the denoise button if you wanna go back to that. So it's definitely non-destructive. So now that Lightroom is done, super easy, super fast, I'm gonna go ahead and bring this into Photoshop. Okay, so we're in Photoshop now, and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and open up my action, my own custom action that I created myself from scratch. And this basically has frequency separation for skin retouching, dodge and burn, and color grading. So I'm gonna go ahead and click this, press play, and it's automatically gonna go ahead and open up all those things. If you'd like to download this action, you can. It's attached to the bottom of this video. So go ahead and download it for free. My little gift to you. With the texture layer selected, I'm then gonna come over to my healing brush tool. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom right in, and I'm just gonna go ahead and take care of any flaws that really stand out. Not a lot stands out, but I'm just gonna go ahead and take care of the ones that stand out to me. I try to keep it as natural and most realistic as possible. We're not trying to edit this like a fashion or a glamor portrait. This is a business headshot. So we're gonna go ahead and just keep it light here. I like to add a black and white layer, and that allows me to see any flaws or imperfections really easily by turning down the yellows and the reds in that layer. As you can see, we can see some more sunspots, things like that. Like I said before, we're gonna keep it very light here, but this is just something else that I use to bring my retouching to that next level. Okay, so now that the texture portion of the skin retouch is done, I'm gonna go ahead and even out the tones and the color of the skin. I'll do that by selecting my color layer, going to my lasso tool, and I'm just gonna go ahead and select an area of the skin just like this. And then I'm gonna go to filter, blur, gaussian blur. This is about 12 and a half. That sounds about right to me. Looks good. Hit okay. And I'm just gonna go ahead and continue to do this for the rest of the face. Great. So now that that's done, I'm gonna go ahead and move on to dodge and burn. And for burn, I'm basically gonna take my paintbrush tool, soft setting, and I'm just gonna focus on any of the shadows or dark areas on the face and simply highlight them. Okay, now I'm gonna go ahead and do dodge. It's basically the opposite. I'm gonna focus on all the highlights. Great. Now you're probably thinking this looks like crap and absolutely does. I totally agree with you, but we're not finished with it yet. I'm gonna go ahead and close the grouping out right here where it says dodge and burn. I'm gonna go to opacity. I'm gonna turn it all the way down so the effect isn't even there. Then I'm gonna slowly raise it up until I start seeing the effect being applied, giving it some definition and some pop. Usually between 10 and 15 gets the job done. I'm gonna go ahead and leave it at 10 right there. And you can see it's adding definition. It's adding that pop, that depth. I'm cool with that. Next is color grading. And I'm going to go ahead and start with selective color to add a little bit more fullness and richness to her skin tone. I'm gonna work with the reds and the yellows. And then I'm also gonna go to the whites and add a little cyan to the whites so it just cools everything off. Once I'm done with that, go to gradient maps. I activate that. I go to basics, black and white. I bring this down to about 11. And then I hit soft light, subtle, but very nice. And I'm done with color grading. And that's pretty much all I'm gonna do in Photoshop. I can turn off all the effects here so you can see what it looks like. This is how we brought it in from Lightroom. This is with the skin retouching. This is with the dodge and burn. And this is with the color grade. I'm gonna go ahead and hit save. And this will automatically be saved in the same Lightroom session that you brought it in from so you can continue working on the photo. We are back in Lightroom now with our Photoshop edits applied. And I'm just gonna look for any last minute retouching things that I can do. I think I'm gonna just go ahead and boost the shadows just a little bit more in the face. There it is, just like that. I see a little spot on her jacket right here. It looks like it's part of the design, but I don't want people to misconstrue that. So I'm just gonna go to the healing. I'm gonna go to the clone in Lightroom. Click that, now it's gone. And yeah, we are officially done with our corporate headshot. And the best thing about what I showed you today is that if you would've had a team of 40 or 50 people, once you have that first shot done, that first setup done, it's just stand and repeat. Like I said earlier in the video, there's tons of different headshot types, tons of different ways you can take headshots, but this is how I believe a corporate headshot should be taken. These corporations can spend really good money on corporate headshots, and if you wanna be able to grab some of that money, you have to be able to deliver those results. If you have any questions about what I showed you today, either talking about the gear or the setup or the lighting or editing, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below. I appreciate the views, appreciate the time you spent with me today, and I'll catch you guys in the next video. Talk to you later. Peace.