How to Enhance Your Lighting Skills
I was recently asked by someone to advice on how to enhance his lighting skills. I thought that this would be a good thing to share with everyone since this is not the first time I’ve been asked this question.
Before answering, let’s first ask:
What Makes a Good Lighter?
In my opinion a good lighter needs to posses good aesthetics and good technical skills. Notice that I said “good” and not “excellent”. Why? because the key is to be able to balance both. Some people are more technical and some are more artistic, but what really matters is how much the artistic and technical complement the overall result. One thing is for sure though, a good lighter has to be creative. He/She has to be creative because a good lighter has to be a problem solver most of the time. This is what most lighters do. We’re at the end of the pipeline, and we’re pretty much the ones that need to patch up and resolve problems and mistakes that were not visible until the lights were turned on.
Now that we know what makes a good lighter, we can answer the question of…
How to Enhance Your Lighting Skills
The first and most obvious answer to this is…
Practice
That’s right! Practice makes perfect. If you spend enough time lighting, you will know what to do and what to look for in order to make the shot beautiful. Sometimes I look at some of the shots I did early on in my career, and I can’t believe I actually thought they were good enough. This brings me very quickly to my second suggestion.
“Plus” Your Shot
Don’t always think that it’s “good enough”. A great artist is a perfectionist. Even if you think that the shot is passable, there are always little details that will make it better.
Get a Camera
Yup! You need to observe the world around you and you need to learn how light behaves in real life. How it reacts on different materials and most of all how the lighting composition affects your shot. I think this is the most important advice I can give to anyone who wants to be better at lighting. CG Lighting is now advanced enough to mimic real life dynamics. Learn how bounce behaves in the real world, use cards to make your shot better, see what tricks you need to use to draw your eye to the subject. Study how reflections and caustics behave in real life.
Borrow Someone’s Eyes
I almost forgot to point this out, but my colleague (Antonio Carrasco Pinto), who sits next to me, reminded me. It is very important to have someone else look at your work and get their input. When you’re working on a shot, it is very easy to get lost in little details and get “tunnel vision”. You’d be surprised what other people will see. This also teaches us to accept critique.
…finally..
Stay Up to Date
Being aware of what new renderers or applications are out there is always a good thing. Knowing the differences between VRay, Arnold and Renderman is something that can help you understand where things are going and how to take the best of their worlds. There’s nothing worse than to be fanatic about just one tool, because in this competitive world things are evolving and getting faster by the minute. So even if you’re a great lighter, but you only want to use Mental Ray… Anyway, you get the idea.
Conclusion
This is my opinion on how to improve your lighting skill. I’m sure there are lots of other things that can help 🙂
william e. arias 