Simulating softbox lighting in Photoshop

I love my strobe lights and umbrellas – they give off great light.  But sometimes I wish I had softboxes to control the spread of the light and create moodier photos.  Until I get my paws on a softbox, here’s how I fake the softbox look.

The inspiration

One day several months ago my girls were climbing all over me, so I pulled out my mobile phone and snapped this quick self portrait:

The photo quality was terrible, but as a dude in a house full of girls, it was a great visual metaphor of my life.  My mission: recreate this as a better quality photo.  Here’s what I was able to come up with:

The setup

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the wardrobe pickings, but I did have some direction in my head: I wanted a drab background, I wanted me to be wearing drab casual clothes, and I wanted my girls to be dressed in pink.  This would reinforce the “story” that I was trying to capture: drab ol’ dad surrounded by his frilly little girls.

As for the lighting and background, I placed a single strobe/umbrella at about 2 o’clock and up as high as the 12’ ceiling would allow (I was going for “moody” and “reflective”), and hung my standard DIY backdrop cloth as a background.

The shot

With my wife as the trigger-man, we shot a dozen or so shots of me doing my best to hold or otherwise support my three daughters.  I really didn’t want to do any Photoshopping of faces – you know, where you aggregate the best faces from multiple photos into one artificially “great” photo?  That totally has its place, but not here.  Not this photo.  Regardless of all of the other edits I knew I was going to do, I wanted us to be real.  We ended up with a couple good shots and selected this one as the best:

Now, as you can see, there are multiple problems with this photo, but our faces and postures looked good to me.  With that, believe it or not, the hard part was over.

The Photoshop edits

As I mentioned before, the problems with the original photo are numerous: it’s off center and crooked (not at all a criticism to my lovely wife/assistant; I couldn’t have done this shot without her), the backdrop doesn’t extend to the top of the frame, and the card table used to increase the height of the strobe light is visible.  Let’s take care of these critical issues first before worrying about the “higher order” problem of making this look like cool, moody softbox lighting.

First, using a couple guides as a reference, I rotate the image slightly to straighten it up and expand the canvas to give me some leg room.

Using the Clone and Healing tools, I get rid of the clutter on the right, extend the backdrop on the top, and add to the background on the left.  There are also these pesky seams in my backdrop, so I’ll get rid of those too while I’m at it.  I don’t feel like thinking about final aspect ratio yet (5 x 7?  8 x 10? Who knows) so I just clone the background out a little more and do a quick crop to get rid of the distracting tilt (I’ll do a final crop as one of the last steps).

One of the first issues I want to address is normalizing the pink hues in my girls’ outfits.  That is, I want the pinks to be the same pink.  By carefully selecting their clothing, I apply a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (with Colorize selected) and dial in a single hue of pink.

The most important adjustment I need to make with this image has to do with the lighting, and it’s really to compensate for me not having the right equipment.  I wish I had a softbox that would have directed the light on me and my girls and restricted the light from hitting the rest of the room.  But I don’t have a softbox (yet); all I have are umbrellas which gush light all over the place.  I’ll have to fake the softbox effect by darkening the edges and creating a vignette.

First I draw a shape with the Elliptical Marquee Tool that represents the general shape of light that I’m shooting for—I want our upper torsos and faces to be well-lit but then everything else should fall off into the shadows.

Next I hit the Q key to hop into Quick Mask Mode, as this will allow me to build the right selection visually.

Initially the mask is inverted—it’s protecting the areas that I want exposed and exposing the areas that I want protected.  I hit Ctrl+I to invert it and make it right.

Next, I apply a ton of Gaussian Blur to soften the edges of what will be my selection.

Note, however, that this makes  some of our faces partially masked (as noted by being partially red).  Since I don’t want our faces to be darkened at all, I protect them by touching each face with a big, soft-edge brush loaded with black paint (remember, I’m painting on the mask in Quick Mask Mode, not the actual image!).

With the mask done, I can exit out of Quick Mask Mode by hitting the Q key and admire my new selection.

With the selection still active, I create a Curves adjustment layer and dial in a nice vignette by adjusting the output level white point and the overall midpoint curve.  Nothing scientific about those settings…just eyeballing it.

Lastly, I need to do something about that background.  It needs to be more drab and it currently has a reddish color cast to it.  Fortunately, I don’t need to do any complicated color correction; I just need to desaturate it a bit.  By doing a careful selection around my girls and me, and then inverting that selection, I create an adjustment layer that will just affect the background.

If I desaturate it all the way, it looks weird; leaving some of its color makes it look real but still neutral.

I decide to crop it as a 5 x 7, and apply some final Levels adjustments and mild sharpening.

With that, I call it done.  I love this photo.  Mission accomplished.

Lessons learned

• Having the right lighting and backdrops can eliminate a ton of Photoshop work, but sometimes you have to make do with what you have.  Things can still turn out great; it’ll just take some extra work.