Tutorial 2: Intro to lighting.
This tutorial will focus on the basics of lighting and teach some terms and references for future tutorials. There's no real way to separate lighting from photography so you'll just have to learn them both as you go. If you know how to light your scene, taking photos will become a lot easier, so I'm hoping this tutorial will help with that.
In film and photography there are all sorts of lighting types, however this is the sims so you only need to know two different lighting principles: "studio lighting" and "story lighting".
Studio lighting is used to light a model or object up in its entirety. The point is to flood the whole area. This lighting is useful for simmers who create works, because it allows viewers to see exactly what is on display whether its an accessory or a pose.
The image above uses soft lighting and a lot of it, this means that no hard shadows fall across the model, which makes it easier to see whats on display.
on the contrary, sims stories, like other forms of creative media, rely on lighting to dictate mood. A sad scene needs a moody dark lighting, a happy scene needs a warm bright lighting. These help readers immerse themselves into the story, making it more enjoyable.
The image below uses two key lights, which make shadows fall across the middle of the models face. This adds drama to the scene.
Ok, but I can do all that in reshade so why should I learn about lighting?
reshade is a very great tool and it makes taking photos so much easier, however the tradeoff is that it's slow, clunky and causes crashes in both ts4 and ts3, this makes the process longer and more frustrating.
The thing is, there's absolutely nothing reshade can do, that your photo editing program can't do. The only difference is that reshade works in real time. Sometimes it's very useful, but when you just want some simple edits done, it can be beneficial to simply learn the tools you need to make the editing process easier.
Key light - If you shine a torch or spotlight directly at something, that is a key light.
Soft light - light that has been diffused somewhat. If you put a paper in front of your torch, your key light will turn into a diffused light. Photographers usually use specially made umbrellas for this.
What these mean for the sims:
Usually a colour light, but not always, it's a light that shines directly on your sim at close range on either "normal" or "bright".
(It doesn't have to be from this angle but it's common.)
Any light that fills up the area or creates soft shadows across your sims. Creating a soft light is as easy as pulling the lights a little bit further away from your sims, since the EA lights don't actually create hard shadows to begin with.
(this picture features mostly soft light, as everything is lit up and there isn't any hard shadows)
The look of your scene will completely change based on it's lighting. Lighting your scene correctly will make editing things a lot easier in your photo editing program. Basically the better your photos are in the first instance, the less corrections you have to make, which means a smoother process and more time for playing :)
Lets do some comparisons:
as you can see I wanted a purple lit photo for the first one but the lighting was terrible. The second photo is better lit and you can see their faces clearly.
After editing to make the picture purple, The left photo would still need a lot more corrections to be anything close to the second photo. However the photo on the right would only need small adjustments.
In this scene I made the mistake of not having any soft lighting on the models so you can't see their faces in the first picture. In the second picture their faces are well lit.
In the left photo I just threw the lights anywhere. this makes the photo somewhat ok because it's still lit, but none of the lights reach the red-haired model, making his colouring look off, on top of that he doesn't really look like he's in the scene, because he is not lit up properly.
In the right photo, I put a light directly on him, as well as bringing a light closer to the model in black. Now they both look like they are engaging in the scene. However, I wanted the scene to look a little more cozy.
In this photo I adjusted the lights to have an orange look and lowered the dimness, and added one more light. Now the scene looks warm. This made it easy to add a sepia overlay in GIMP which can be seen on the right.
Compared to the very first photo, the last photo looks very cozy and warm. Even if I didn't edit the photo, the picture in the bottom left looks way more cozy than the top left.
This is the difference lighting can make.
I staged the lighting for the first scene, so it's fine on it's own, but I thought it'd be more dramatic if I added some colour. Minor edits like this can really change the feel of your pictures.
In the later tutorials I will teach you exactly how to set up lighting for different scenes, but I hope this gives you some inspiration and courage because making sims stories is so fun and it doesn't have to be difficult at all.
Previous tutorial: easy photoshoot tutorial
Next tutorial: Understanding composition.
