Lighting
6 min
How we light skin so it still looks like skin
Beauty dish, V-flat, two strips: the setup behind most of our beauty work, and why we retouch so little.
Written by
Inès Varo, founder and photographer
Most over-retouched beauty images start with bad light. If the light is flat, the skin looks flat, and someone reaches for the blur tool. We solve it before the shutter fires.
The setup
Our default is a 22-inch beauty dish about 30 degrees above the lens, a white V-flat under the chin, and two strip boxes behind the model for separation. It is not clever. It is repeatable, and repeatable is what a campaign needs.
After that we retouch dust, stray hairs and colour. Pores stay. Fine hair stays. Clients who worry about that tend to stop worrying when they see the first frames at full size.
Journal
More from the set
All notes
Lighting
6 min
How we light skin so it still looks like skin
Beauty dish, V-flat, two strips: the setup behind most of our beauty work, and why we retouch so little.
Production
4 min
The call sheet we send before every shoot
One page, sent 48 hours before call time. What goes on it, and what we have learned to leave off.
Process
5 min
Why we still shoot tethered
Every frame lands on a calibrated screen as it is shot. It slows nothing down and it saves reshoots.
