Taking Photos with NO Lighting.

I am not a professional, simply a momtographer with a camera who loves to learn new tricks. One of the most difficult things about our blog and instagram world is timing, 90% of our posts happen between 10 a.m and 1 p.m. because that is when the lighting is best! Being from the pacific northwest, strong natural lighting can be hard to find between all the trees and especially in the oh so gloomy days of the fall/winter so I wanted to find an easy way to be able to accomplish taking photos in poor lighting and being able to edit them to make our readers never be able to tell the difference! These tips work for me but may not work for everyone, and always edit to your own personal taste. This tutorial was taken with a DSLR camera (you may be able to use the same trick with a phone camera, if you try and it works let me know!) and was edited on out computer using Lightroom 5, however I know there are lots of amazing apps and websites out there that can help you accomplish the same things!

Here is our before photo, this was taken in my sons completely dark room (minus a small night light in the corner) when he was sleeping with a flash on. The trick is to "diffuse" the flash as much as possible because we all know what flash photos look like.. very bright, unclear and unappealing.

The key to getting it to look appropriately lit (for editing purposes) is to use a diffuser over your camera's flash. You can get these for relatively cheap at just about any camera store you walk into, but my husband being the penny pincher that he is wanted to see if he could come up with a DIY before venturing into the idea of purchasing one. I do have to say, it's worked out better than a few diffusers I have seen and it was of NO cost to myself. The photo below is what we saw when pinteresting the idea and we simply use a white envelope that I hold at an angle in front of our camera and it works effortlessly. It is crucial that the paper/envelope/notecard that you use is white otherwise your photo will start to turn the color of the paper.

After snapping the photo my work with the camera was done! We got a photo that looked lit well enough to be edited and I was able to let my little man snooze away. The first edit we always do is the exposure, key is to brighten the photo to your personal liking to make it look as natural as possible. I want people to think I took this next to an open window with loads of sunlight!

As you can see, while it brightens up the photo the colors are still out of whack and the photo is what you call "warm" (warm vs. cold is how yellow/orange/red a photo is vs. blue/purple, just like warn vs. cool colors). So next we took the Temperature of the photo and dragged it way down to the cooler side.

We made it 'cool' enough to make the whites of the photo look white instead of yellow while keeping his skin tone from turing to an awkward purple color that I dislike. The next step is to work closely with the lighting of the photo. You can see there are areas of the photo that are much brighter or darker than the others, and truly I will only be able to tweak this. Without an expensive camera some things won't ever be "perfect"! So our next step was to being down the highlights ever so slightly to try to gain back a little definition to the photo.

I love adding some clarity to a photo, it helps in definition, however you can surely over clarify a photo and it will look discolored. Every time that I use the clarity tool I try to also bring up the shadows in the photo VERY lightly because when clarifying I feel that the darker areas of the photo can get a little too dark. Although this edit is very subtle, it brings out details like his hair and details within his pillow.

The next thing that I personally like to do is play around with the saturation and vibrance of a photo, I almost always turn down the saturation by a smidge just because this is a personal taste, you can turn them up making your colors much more bright and vibrant as well. Too vibrant of colors results in graininess of your photo so be weary!

The next edit is forever my favorite. Before venturing into photography I always drooled over how a photographer could make someone's skin look so flawless. After getting my camera I expected this to happen all on its own, but realized quickly that photography is just as much about editing as it is about taking the photos themselves. I talked about this in a previous tutorial and you may have to zoom in to see the fine details but always always always sharpen your photos, this takes the photo from good to great. If I sharpen to 100, I always reduce noise (soften) by 50. This is what gives your photos the airbrushed effect as sharpening will make your photos nice and clear but it will also create a clarity issue by creating a fuzz. The better the camera, the more this will do it on it's own, but again until I have that kind of money this will work just fine!

(Sharpness increased, note 'fuzziness' in areas of the photo)

(Noise Reduced i.e. softness added to balance the sharpness)

One of the last things that I tend to do with my photos is adjust the whites, again this is a personal touch that I enjoy! I love my whites being bright and bold in a photo, I feel that it makes it look clean (and from what I have observed bright whites are a big deal within the social media world) so carefully I boost the whites in the photo enough to bring that final "oomph" to a photo!

Adding a white vignette to your photo will help get rid of the dark shadows around the edges of your photo that I always find troublesome! Typically a black vignette is added for photographic effect however in photos where you have a predominately white background adding white edges helps loads!

And there you have it! A photo taken in complete darkness edited enough to look as if there was the aid of natural lighting. Take the tips as you see necessary, and explore with the tools you have in order to customize a photo to your liking! The beauty of photography is that you have the ability to go in any direction you please, and each photo will turn out differently each time. Happy editing my friends!

-T