So let's have a look at butterfly lighting now. Now butterfly lighting is really important because nearly all beauty shots 99.9% of all beauty shop photography is going to start with Butterfly lighting. So if you've seen images of young ladies in makeup and and the skin looks very smooth and they don't seem to have any pause, that's because they're using beauty lighting, which at its core, its main has butterfly lighting. Now if you're really interested in seeing some different modern takes on beauty lighting, I do suggest you check out my advanced studio lighting course when we go into this and a lot of other interesting styles that are out there at the moment. But we do that mainly with studio lighting will also show you an example of beauty lighting with a very simple setup just using umbrellas and flashes he can get very similar results. But that's an advanced course I suggest you check that out.

But let's just go and have a look at the classic beauty lighting position. So this is butterfly lighting. Normally we would have a softer softbox. But again, I'm using this particular small softbox because I want you to be able to see what this looks like with a high dynamic range or a high, bright to shadow ratio that comes from using a small light source like this. And what we can see here is the reason it's called butterfly lighting. I don't actually think it's that good a name because it does confuse people.

But essentially the idea is there's a shape of a butterfly in the shadow under the nose here, that's essentially why it's called butterfly lighting because it creates this butterfly. But let's go and have a look at how we would set that up in the virtual studio. So from above, we can see it's very simple. This line is actually above the subject. Now this angle is very important. What we've got is we've pretty much got a 45 degree angle, if we go from floor to ceiling.

It's straight onto the subject. And it's in line with the camera and the face and the face is straight into the light. Now, if the subject was looking away, and you wanted to use this light, you would follow her face around with the light source, because the light source in this lighting scenario, must sit right in front of the face. So what we've done Here is then we've lit down. So if you're using a studio and put this on a boom arm, we've lit down. And we've got this very strong dramatic look.

And as you can see, it's quite a simple straightforward setup. Now we've classic beauty lights, and we're going to see that we have created shadow in the eyes. So this can obviously create an issue unless we're going for this particular look. Now you'll notice the other thing is it does is it really accentuates cheeks. It really brings out the shape so you've got a lot of light across the forehead, you've got this lovely light down the front of the nose. You've got a little bit under the eyes, and then you've got the chin.

So it really does draw out that keyhole shape in someone's face. So what we do have to do in these scenarios, is we have to add some fill light, but this time We're going to add it from underneath. We're going to soften the shadows under the chin, and we're going to soften those cheeks. So if you just compare them now, that's without any fill light. And that's with Phil and if he's doing true beauty lighting would bring a couple of more lights in on the side, just soften those shadows up a bit. But like I mentioned earlier, if you're really interested in that, how to do that, take my advanced studio lighting course.

But let's go and have a look at the virtual studio and see how we've placed the lights. So once again, sticking with a very simple lighting setup, we've got a small flash into a reflective umbrella, bouncing back up under the chin, you could do it with a normal umbrella as well. So you could do a shoot through umbrella and bring that up. Now a lot of people when they do this, we'll use a reflector and put reflector under under the subjects chin and you can do that with a silver reflector, but I prefer to use flash because I know how much light I'm actually getting. Under the subjects chin again, we've got all the setups available for PDF, you got the ratings and the positions and the heights and everything and the camera settings. So make sure you have a look at those PDFs and download them for your own reference.

So that is the setup for adding some Phil to butterfly lighting. Please remember if you've got any questions at any time, just add them in the lecture area. And if you enjoyed the course, why don't you leave a review. Now the other thing to note about this fail I've actually got this feel quite low and it's quite far away from the subject. So you could actually take that fill like that reflective umbrella, maybe move it a little bit closer and you might get slightly more different all i under the chin is just put the as a guide, so the core main light pretty much stays like that. Now you could move the main light down a bit and make the angle A little bit shallow.

So you can maybe move the light from here to here. And that's going to bring a little bit more light into the eyes. But I wanted to show you, you know, the setup, just most dramatic and then bring it here is going to soften that a little bit, maybe bringing in the umbrella a little bit closer, might soften under the chin as well, but you've got the idea. So one of the things I do recommend is grab someone, sit them on a chair, get those lights in there, and have a play.