Hello! I have found a wealth of great info on this forum, and wanted to ask a question, that may or may not be related.
I have been trying to achieve a similar look to these photographs, at the link below. My work is similar to this, in that I use pretty long exposures with mixed lighting to achieve these color casts. However, this technique of long exposures, dark images, doesnt work so well when I now want to get the models faces sharp....
Does anyone know how he achieves this look? Im asking this question here because I am well versed in digital retouching and am starting to wonder if these are photoshop techniques..

Thanks everyone!! Anything would help!

http://shotview.com/artists/luis-sanchis/vogue-gioiello
http://shotview.com/artists/luis-sanchis/sz

usually with things like that there are two ways that i have seen.

one is to pop your flash and drag your shutter. It looks like this may have been what he did. IE...those lights in the background etc are not as bright as they seem...due to longer exposures. So set your main light for the model, have the background and ambient light sources maybe 3-5 stops less...flash pops exposes the model....keeps her face sharp...ambient light burns in from the long exposure.

second way is to have it all set up...shoot to expose just for the model...have the model step out of the scene...and either re-expose the scene sans model, or take a new frame...combine later in Photoshop.

Good luck

Thanks for the suggestion!
My first choice, is to do as much in camera as possible..any ideas of what kind of lighting is on the model?

It looks like he is using a lot of gels. They are probably some hot lights, gelled, and some strobes for the model.

best advice is to start with one light...and build up from there until you what you are looking for. But really, i think gels are the key to the colors he is getting.


I kind of cheap shortcut is to do some painting with light. use one main light to get the model, then have a flashlight with a gel over it and paint in the walls, etc....mileage may vary

thanks for the great advice!