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mangaemi

Lighting those beautiful eyes!

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mangaemi

Soooo... I recently got a lightbox with two lamps (nothing super fancy, just bare bones stuff). I've noticed though I'm having a hard time trying to get dollfie eyes to show up very well without shining light directly on them... Is it possible I need a 3rd light to shine infront of her with the lightbox semi-zipped up? Or is the eye-lightening done in PS or something like that? My gal Nora has Melty's purple eyes and it's hard to get those to not show up so dark... o__O


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The Family: Sheryl, Ranka, Kirika, Arlex2, Yoko, Snow Miku, Haruka, Student Mariko, Prisma Illya, Akira, Maria, Cirno, Noumi, Asuna Titania, Sakuya

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Jezrah

Ah, I was just reading about this on DoA in preparation for making my own lightbox. Some said they used a refector panel (or white paper) to tilt some of the ambient light up to the face. Haven't tried it yet since my box isn't finished yet, but that's what they said.


32717445532_3aa446bd94_m.jpg

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mangaemi

i wonder if tinfoil glued to some cardboard would work?? XD


♥ ★ ✮ ~ Amassing an army of Anime Cuties ~ ✮ ★ ♥

The Family: Sheryl, Ranka, Kirika, Arlex2, Yoko, Snow Miku, Haruka, Student Mariko, Prisma Illya, Akira, Maria, Cirno, Noumi, Asuna Titania, Sakuya

on the way: want: Sailor Moon, Miki, Yukiho

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tinydollproblem

My dad uses Bristol board to bounce light off of. It's a softer effect then if you used tin foil or another metallic paper/substance. Not sure if it'll be to soft though

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Smithy
i wonder if tinfoil glued to some cardboard would work?? XD

Tinfoil on cardboard should work fine. I've used it many times as a cheap DIY reflector.

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Nekopon
i wonder if tinfoil glued to some cardboard would work?? XD

Tinfoil on cardboard should work fine. I've used it many times as a cheap DIY reflector.

 

I do this as well! Tin foil on foam core for me. Silver on one side, white on the other!

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gaiaswill

Foam or cardboard panels work fine, but reflectors need to be large to be effective. Larger ones are more bleepbersome to store and are relatively difficult to keep clean and undamaged.

 

I personally like collapsible reflectors. You can get fairly large no-brand ones from eBay for ~$10-20. They fold in on themselves to about 1/3 their expanded size. Usually they come with a case and can swap to different finishes–white, silver, gold and possibly in-between them.

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Quillis

gaiaswill, are those reflectors kind of like the things you stick in your car's windshield to reflect sunlight?

 

I'm just wondering if one of those will work in a pinch. ^^; I imagine, since the car things are so big, that the effect would be more spread out... if it's even possible to get it to work the way you want on something as small as a doll. *confused*

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gaiaswill

Something like that, yes. The colors on the windshield reflectors I own are black and gray so maybe look for something more reflective.

 

The reflector I use is more like this. It cost about $15 from a Chinese eBay seller. Rise loves being photographed so she volunteered to act as the scale.

 

Folded:

folded_zpsc07fdf51.jpg

 

Unfolded:

unfolded_zps11be8843.jpg

 

Using reflector to bounce light into her face. The irises are clearly lit.

holidayrise_zpsa3ef168a.jpg

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XOHimitsuOX

I used to use a reflector, but found it too troublesome in some cases where i was using one hand to hold the camera and the other with the reflector and trying to get the correct angle to bounce the light while taking a photo. It's even harder on a windy day

 

Now i use an external flash and direct the light at the desired location or bounce the light off walls and/or ceilings. Having one less thing to do made it easier to focus on taking photos. Using a reflector is more of a 2 man job.

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BeyondTime

If you are going to do indoor work with lighting I would recommend leaning how the inverse square law of light affects photographers.

 

Basically if you double the distance between the light source and the subject you cut the amount of light to 1/4 it's original power, and therefore need four times the exposure time. If the light source in front of the doll is a long distance away, and your exposure time is based on a stronger light source closer to her that isn't shining light on her eyes the eyes will be darker in the final image. This rule applies to any light source including reflected light.

 

With digital you can try different light positions, and see immediately how the different lighting positions change the image. Experiment with things, and it costs you nothing to move one light twice as far from the subject and see the effect. Play with that a lot and you will learn to take better photo's.

 

One other note I would make. If you are shooting in Camera Raw format - and if you are going to photoshop images you should learn how to use Camera Raw - then it's important to understand that the preview image on the screen on the back of the camera is a .jpg image generated from your raw file. That .jpg image is corrected for exposure, white balance, and color saturation by your cameras own internal computerized darkroom lab based on the settings that you chose when you setup the camera. That means that your raw file can be underexposed or overexposed, but the .jpg image looks properly exposed on the back of the camera. The eyes can look great on the preview and like little black coals when you get it on the computer.

 

With that said Camera Raw is not an image file. Camera Raw is a data file that contains a recording of all the light readings taken by your cameras sensor from the moment the shutter opened until the moment the shutter closed. Camera Raw is analogous to the old style film negatives, which means you need to process it in a digital darkroom - aka Photoshop, Lightroom, GIMP - in order to produce an actual image. It's easy to do, but you have to know what you are doing. If you aren't familiar with how to use Photoshop I'd recommend use Lightroom and pickup a book on Lightroom. It's really easy to use and is a great intro into the world of photo editing. It has a much lower learning curve than Photoshop, and many pro's do all their work in Lightroom and only go into Photoshop to do advanced masking.


The difference between Dollfie Dreams and Heroin? Heroin is illegal, Dollfie Dreams probably should be.

“Empty wallets, full hearts.” That’s probably an apt description for the effects of DD addiction

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Keijogirl

One tip I learned in DoA was to cover your camera's flash with a paper towel folded over once or twice. It acts as a diffuser for the flash and can light the face pretty evenly like a light box but better for those pressed for space

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