I've seen several people lament over the past week that they aren't good at gpose lighting, so between that and recent discussions of a certain prominent pro-AI gposer, I thought I'd throw something together about how I do my lighting in gpose. Hopefully this'll be helpful to some of you!
My go to setup for lighting is two rim lights sandwiching my subject. This is a bit of an extreme example, but you can clearly see where I dropped the red and the blue lights versus how they frame her in the actual shot that I wanted.
For something a little less extreme I still try to get a good profile light on the side of her face/body that's the furthest away from the camera, usually the side that's going to be in the most shadow. Just enough light to brush up and reflect off of her to make the line between her and the background a little clearer.
And this is especially necessary when hair colour matches the background colour, like when I want to take pictures of Vaisha with their pitch black hair at night.
This one is a bit more on the extreme side, but I was also making a themed shot to go with an ask. The important part is highlighting the part of their face that's deeper in shadow so the colour can reflect off of it and define it against the dark background.
Even with brightly lit subjects and brightly lit areas, you're still going to get some weird shadows, so having a couple rim lights to fill in the gaps makes a shot look more rounded. Here's a recent glamtober shot taken in broad daylight, before and after I dropped a yellow and pink light on either side of her.
While the shot on the left is fine on it's own, the shadow of the chair behind her, the shadow of the skirt, and the shadow cast on the right side of her hair pull away from the rest of the daylight. The bright yellow of the chair cushion is a little jarring against the duller purple of the dress. By adding the pink light off to her right, and a golden light behind her to the left, the rest of the picture warms back up and is tinted a little more to the pink side and makes everything look a little more unified.
I also will use lighting to either amplify preexisting light sources or mimic natural light sources.
For example, this alpine lamp is not actually very bright. So what I did was swing the camera around until the lamp filled my field of view and then put a gold light right on top of it to cast a soft backlight over the two of them on the couch.
Or mimicking and enhancing the light of the setting sun here. I dropped a red-gold light off some distance opposite of the camera, where the sun would be coming in, to better reflect off of Kitali's face.
Another example is putting down a very light pink light on the sand to mimic the reflected sunlight. You can just barely see it on the outline of their pants, but it was enough to light the underside of Estinien's face for the final shot.
A more subtle example is placing a pale blue glow to her right to match the glow of the Fae spear, and a soft orange light to her left to match the glowing tree mushrooms. This one even comes with free complementary colours!
A couple more examples of enhancing natural and object light.
A bright blue light dropped at the tip of the spear to enhance it's glow.
Red reflecting off of Nidhogg's Eye.
A strong orange to her right to mimic the setting sun.
A cool blue from above and to her left to strengthen the moonlight.
And sometimes I just start throwing in colours for fun, or to play with colour theory for some extra pop.
And if you want to get funky you can throw down a pride flag!
TL;DR is: wrapping your subjects with light rather than aiming a single point directly at them will help round out the shot, strengthening the natural lighting can help enhance a shot without making it look overproduced, and adding points of complementary colour adds interest and breaks up monochromatic colour palettes.
Most importantly, have fun with it!
(And if you found this helpful I'd appreciate it if you could reblog!)
