Car photography lighting setup with Profoto B1 Flash/Strobe

Hey, what's up amigos? Today we're going to shoot a Golf GTI. Let's see how it goes. It's a white color. Why do they keep on coming white colors? The color white is a bit challenging in comparison to other colors. It's just hard to get the shadows and the highlights right. So today we're going to shoot using the Sony a7R II plus we're going to use the Profoto. You see this? That's kind of my store. Today we're going to use the Profoto B1. There it is. This guy over here yields about 500 watts and pretty powerful. Alongside with it we're going to use the 1x4 third box modifier. I hope it's intact. So this is the setup right now. We have the Profoto B1 on a Montroto light stand which I'll be actually battling with. I'll show you how in a bit. This is the car. We're going to take multiple shots. So a few of the front, one with the light breaks at the back of taillights, and then maybe one with the daylights on. All right so this is a very, well not very, but it's a heavy setup. One of the reasons why I'm not using the 1x6 strip box is just to try to control the weight. As you can see I'm trying to take different shots from different distances of the car itself. Since I don't really have something or a reference of which I'm looking at what I'm shooting. So I take multiple shots just trying to get the right angle somewhere in the middle. Trying to position that strip box without me appearing in the picture. All right so now that we're done shooting I imported everything into Adobe Lightroom and I went ahead and scanned through the shots. Now some of them were underexposed, some of them were okay. That's why you should do a tethered shooting in which you have a laptop. All the photos sort of get tethered to your favorite application whether it's Lightroom or Capture One and that way you can monitor what's coming in and you can adjust accordingly. But it was very hard to do it with only sort of one or two people. Anyway, looking at it through the camera was also hard. The monitor is just, you know, the LCD screen is too small to measure. It's usually brighter than what it appears to be. Anyway, so I scanned through the shots and I selected a few. Now let me show you what I've selected. This is going to be the base exposure. I adjusted some of the settings here like the exposure because I thought this was a bit underexposed. I raised a bit of the shadows and that's about it. This is the before and this is the after. Why I selected this as a base shot is because I like how the light is spreading evenly. I have this over here which I kind of like. I got a bit of the sides as well but this might be my paint in from a different shot. I like the way the light is spread evenly although we have a dark area here which is fine. I mean we can always copy this area and then apply it here. This area might remain a bit dark which is again, that's okay. I'm not quite sure if I shot another like a very good shot of the logo or the emblem. So we'll see that later on. I think this is what I have so far. All right, moving onwards. I shot like side shots to light up the sides of the car. We might be using them but not necessarily. And that's me setting up lights. Duh. All right, so we're going to use this as the second layer in which we will have the brake lights at the back. So this was shot with 0.8 second and it was so hard to get that. The problem was is we couldn't hit the brakes unless the car was switched on. If you switch or turn the car on then you, by default, the lights gets turned on as well. So we'll see how we can maneuver this in Photoshop. All right, so let's get started. This is the base shot. I'm going to start with these two. So select both, right click and edit in as layer open as layers in Photoshop. All right, so let's have a look at it. I don't think it's properly aligned. I think my cousin there hit the camera a bit. I mean, it's so hard to tell because of the exposure but what we're going to do is just work with it anyway. So I'm going to just arrange this and looking at that, put back the opacity. All right, so we'll start brushing in the details down from the upper part and see how we roll. Add a mask, invert it and select the brush. It must be a white brush. 70% is fine for now. Let's see and I'm going to start adding in the reds. Well, it's not bad, huh? Furthermore, the opacity as well. I'm going just to brush downwards just so it blends. Oh, that's kind of easy, right? All right, so let's solve this problem. So we have the headlight here which is kind of visible. See, we painted in a bit of the remember the issue with the headlights. Let's just paint that back. We can't do it 100% but let's try and adjust it. Yeah, that looks good. Just make sure we have it properly lit here. That's good. All right, so back to this. Now what I'm going to do is just copy this and then flip it. So let's do that. Select, press M. I might just start with the, we'll adjust it accordingly. So we'll paint in what we want to paint and then brush out what we just don't want to appear. Ctrl J, I'm going to move it and then Ctrl T, transform, flip horizontally and let's try and align it. All right, you can see these lines here. Let's try and align them. And let's brush away. You know what we should use here, right? The pen tool. So let's do that. Make selection. All right, and brush X and these. We need these, so let's brush them in. Now I'm going to select and inverse the selection and brush black color and let's fix this. I can see a bit of halo effect down here and that's because the original picture image is not properly aligned manually. Let's deselect. Let's see if we can, yeah, that's kind of fine down there. So let's look at the lights before and after. We missed a part here. Let's just brush it away and there you go. We have it. Now we can do a dodge and burn. Let's do that as well. And select all. Let's fill this layer with 50 percent gray and set the blending mode to overlay. Let's take a brush. All right, I think I'm going to start with the blacks with the flow at three percent and let's just start brushing in. Of course, you can again select the pen tool down here just so you don't go over the highlights, the places that you'd like to keep the highlights. Let me adjust you, my friend. a bit of details down here. I mean, you can zoom in the reflection of the flash. We can definitely paint in the other exposure in which we only have these led, but I kind of like it this way. That's something that you should experiment with. All right, let's do a bit of color toning since everyone would like me to use Photoshop for color toning. It's easy. We'll use the curves in this example and we'll set the blending mode to color and then we'll start with the reds. We'll add a bit of green to the shadows just a bit. I'm just going to keep that a bit with reds in the highlights. Moving on to the blue, do quite the opposite and actually going to add blues in the shadow. And I can add the yellows to the highlights, but I don't like it that much. Maybe it's the car's color. It doesn't fit the yellow. And again, this is very subjective. See about the greens and the mid-tones. I'm going to keep it as it is. See the before and after. Just before that, let's add a channel mixer. Let's try to desaturate first. I think it's just full of colors there. And we forgot to add contrast as well. Let's do a channel mixer and start with the blue. Let's see. No, the red ruined the image. Orange. I mean, you can adjust these sliders accordingly, but I'm just going to stick with the defaults. Let's just add a bit of contrast here and filter. I'll use the Nik Collection Color Effects Pro. I have a video that explains that as well. Let's see. I kind of like that. Correct contrast. Don't want to add a lot. Try the tonal contrast. And that's quite too much. Let's desaturate. Yes. Somewhere around there is good. And I'm going to click OK. All right. There you have it. Let's decrease that. I think it's a bit too much. Say about 61% is fine. Let's add a bit of sharpness. All right. It's time to add a bit of sharpening. And I'm going just to zoom in for the preview. This time I'm going to use the Unsharp Mask. I think it's OK. This is what I've previously used. So an amount of 83% and radius about 2.9. Threshold is 5. I'm going to leave a link to a tutorial about the Unsharp Mask and how to use it properly, so you would know what each one of them does. For now, I'm going to click OK. I can do it selectively. Let's see. I just kind of... looks OK. I don't usually sharpen Now I'm going to add the Channel Mixer that we created earlier. And I'll apply the toning. I think toning is just too much. Increase even the Channel Mixer about 10.9% is fine. All right. We're done. I mean, you can take it to Lightroom and, you know, do the final touches like I do. If you want to add sort of vignettes, you can do it here as well. Let me show you one way. I'll use Curves for this. And just do that. And now I have a mask. Capacity of 15%. Before and after just settle. And that's it, amigos. I hope this was helpful as usual. Sorry about all the interruption. My family is waiting for me to go and have lunch with them. And let me know if you have any questions. Please leave them in the comment section below. Until the next video, amigos. See ya.