Looking at anti-shine options for a natural looking portrait

- There's a lot of lighting that goes into one of these Lynda sets. It looks like a pretty simple set, but it's... There's actually a lot of lighting complexity here. I've got lights lighting my face. I've got this nice hair light back here, this nice back light. You can see there are these nice splashes on the wall here which serve to frame me when I stand in this particular spot. There's a lot of time and effort that goes into this. This is the kind of thing you do when you're lighting a shoot and there are a lot of problems they have to solve to get the light even, to get the look that they want.

I wear glasses, that doesn't help anything. So there are lights that are set up to solve one problem that another light is creating. And that's how it's going to be when you light your own sets whether you're using strobes or continuous light. There's one problem that you can't see right now that has been solved that was not solved with lighting. It was solved with a bottle, or a squeeze tube at least. Take a look at this picture. This is me first arriving on the set today. There's some hot spots on my forehead and on my nose, just basic shine from skin tone that they could not light away and it's very often like this when you're setting up lighting.

You'll go to all this work, you'll get everything looking right and yet still there'll just be a bright spot on someone's face and you'll try diffusers and all sorts of other stuff to get rid of it. Well, the solution here today and most days was not to try to light it away, but to use some special make-up products to make me less shiny. These can be critical tools when you're working on portraiture either in the studio or in the field. And this isn't make-up. They hadn't done anything to make me look different. I don't have eye products on or anything like that. This is just stuff to make my skin less shiny and there are two products that they've used here.

Both of these in this case were made by Mac. This is an anti-shine goo. They just smear it onto my face with a little sponge and it is meant for any skin tone and it goes on and cuts a whole bunch of the shine down and then they put powder on top of that. This is also made by Mac. This is transparent finishing powder and it's applied with a big brush and they brush that on. Now take a look at this photo and you can see the after. Here they are side-by-side. It just took out a couple of those hot spots that are annoying, that could, maybe with a little bit stronger lighting turn into full on over exposure, they're distracting.

With just these two simple products I've been reduced down to a nice matte finish that looks much better and very often that's the only way you solve that particular type of lighting problem is by using products like these to get rid of it. These work great outdoors when you're standing in direct sunlight where maybe you're getting even more shiny because you're a little sweaty. They work in studios under hot continuous lighting. These are very cool lights and there's a lot of air conditioning in here, so there's not that much of a problem with this, but everyone has a little bit of shine. One thing that's nice about this, this is, as I said, transparent finishing powder and this is just this anti-shine gel.

They're made for any skin tone. So you don't need a complex kit for a lot of different types of skin tone. Just these two products will probably get you through most of the lighting situations that you need. There are other products that do the same thing and there are some made specifically for photo and video. You can find these at retailers online like Sephora and it might be worth your time to experiment with different ones to see if there's some that you like better than others or some that follow different price points, but these really are critical tools if you're gonna be portrait shooting with controlled lighting or strong natural light.

They're a great way to solve problems that can otherwise be very difficult to remove through lighting modifiers or effects.