Lighting Guide | Lighting Modifiers Cheat Sheet

When you're new to studio lighting, one of the most intimidating parts can be understanding the variety of lighting modifiers on the market. If that sounds familiar, fear not! Here's a simple cheat sheet for understanding how each one works so that you can find your distinct style!

*This article serves as an excerpt of Photographing Men.

BARN DOORS

Barn doors are light modifiers that allow you to shape and direct light into a variety of shapes manually. They affix to the front of your studio strobe and have four hinged doors that can be set to control the light shape. Barn doors can also be used to block off unwanted light from your background, subject, or camera lens by narrowing the beam of light.

Note: Some barn doors allow you to use gels, grids, and diffusion material to additionally modify the quality, color, and direction of your light.

Beauty Dish

A beauty dish is a shallow parabolic reflector that distributes hard light with really soft edges. It’s a combination of a softbox and a direct flash. Because of the curved shape of a beauty dish, it aims most of the light forward at the model. Beauty dishes come in a variety of sizes and two inner linings, either white or silver.

Silver beauty dishes create more specular contrast to enhance the detail in the image, but they also draw attention to unwanted skin blemishes. I prefer to use a white beauty dish with my subjects because of this.

Note: Most beauty dishes allow you to use diffusion material and grids to modify the quality and direction of light.

Diffusion Material

Diffusion material softens the intensity of light and reduces the contrast between light and shadow by spreading the beam of light. In the studio, diffusion material can be used on light modifiers to soften the intensity of light. On location, you can use large diffusion panels to combat harsh sunlight.

Flags

Flags block light from areas that you don’t want to be lit by either using a stand or handholding the flag. You can find flags in a variety of different sizes depending on your needs. Black flags can also be used to create negative fill or absorb light from unwanted areas of a person’s face or body.

Pro Tip: If you’re on a budget, you can buy a piece of black foam core from your local craft supply store for fairly little money.

Gels

A gel is a colored transparent filter that is applied to lights to modify the light for color correction or for creative lighting. Although color gels come in a variety of colors, the common color-corrected gels used in photography include color temperature blue (CTB), which converts tungsten light into daylight-colored light and color temperature orange (CTO), which converts daylight-colored light into tungsten.

Honeycomb Grid

Honeycomb grids direct light into a focused beam of light. They can be used to control the direction of light better and stop light from spreading out to unwanted areas of the image, similar to flags. Honeycomb grids come in a variety of different degrees to alter the spread of light. As a general rule of thumb, the smaller the degree of the grid you use, the smaller the beam of light.

Octabox

An octabox is merely an eight-sided softbox. The quality of light that your octabox will produce is contingent on its size. Smaller octaboxes produce more directional and contrasty light. Larger octaboxes produce softer, more wrapping forms of light. Octaboxes are great for photographing people because they create a round catchlight that almost looks like the shape of the sun.

Reflector Dish

Reflector dishes are sold with most lighting kits. They spread light evenly over a broad or narrow area, depending on the diameter of the reflector dish. Most reflector dishes create hard shadows and high-contrast, specular lighting. I often use reflector dishes to create very dramatic portraits or to create a circular gradation on the background.

Softbox

The most popular of light modifiers, softboxes eliminate unwanted hot spots and evenly distribute light by creating a very directional and diffused quality of light.

Note: Additional girds can be fixed to the front of a softbox in order to keep light from lighting unwanted areas of your image.

Stripbox

A stripbox is a thin, rectangular softbox. The narrow structure of the stripbox is excellent for lighting hair and creating rim lights. The thin shape of a stripbox makes it great for using next to other lights or in small spaces.

Note: Don’t confuse a stripbox with a strip light. A strip light is a long, narrow strobe with two barn doors.

Umbrella

Umbrellas are among the essential lighting modifiers on the market and are generally a photographer’s first lighting modifier. They’re usually cheap and portable, which is why most beginning photographers gravitate toward using them. There are generally two kinds of umbrellas:

Shoot-through umbrellas: Shoot-through umbrellas diffuse the strobe light that is fired directly at your subject. They create soft, broad light without the harsh shadows that a bare flash would create. Because of the way shoot-through umbrellas are constructed, you can use them closer to your subject in order to soften the light additionally.

Reflective umbrellas: Reflective umbrellas are designed so that your strobe fires into them and reflects light onto the subject. Because of this, the reflective surface of the inside of the umbrella simultaneously broadens and softens the light. You can use a diffusion material over your umbrella to diffuse the light even more. You can buy reflective umbrellas in white, gold, and silver. I prefer white in the studio to create even, smooth skin tones.

FAQs

Which Lighting Modifier is the Best One?

The answer is subjective. As an artist, you can use contrast to set the tone and emotion for your image. For instance, if you’re looking for a lot of drama in your image, you’d want to use a harsher light source. However, if you’re photographing a subject with lots of wrinkles and they are self-conscious about their skin, you’ll want to use a softer form of light.

Which Brand of Studio Lighting Should I Invest in?

The answer is subjective to your needs, vision, and budget. I cannot speak on behalf of any of those regarding your particular needs, but anything that is listed in this post is what I use and have invested in for my own needs. If you’d like advice, I would recommend contacting your local camera store for their input.