Low Key Lighting

I tried some low key lighting and they were barely visible in LR4 had to raise the exposure slider in LR4 almost all the way to the right to make it look ok, clicked the Auto button seemed to do better than me trying all the sliders to make it look like anything, still had to back off on the highlights and adjust shadows and blacks, I adjusted so much trying to make a picture look good that I am sure the picture I took looked nothing like the one I created with adjustments. Is it normal that a low key shot will be severly under exposed?

Thanks

Dude, you HAVE to put something on that link that says you are linking to something with nudes in it.

Certainly this isn't your first time on the Internet.

hes gone wrote in post #16072375
=he's gone;16072375]Dude, you HAVE to put something on that link that says you are linking to something with nudes in it.

Certainly this isn't your first time on the Internet.

I give up, Guess I will just read the forum and if I have a question I will send a PM from now on Dude.

DigitalDon, once you start using punctuation it will become much clearer what you're trying to say, otherwise it feels like a brain dump. Really hard to understand what you mean.
Secondly, it looks like you don't understand what low key portrait is - it's not that everything is severely underexposed, you just need to really control the light and light up only that portion of the image that you'd like to accent - the rest should fall into black.
Here's a good write up:
http://ricknunn.com …w-i-shoot-lowkey-portrait

DigitalDon wrote in post #16072530
I give up, Guess I will just read the forum and if I have a question I will send a PM from now on Dude.

Relax DigitalDude, no reason to give up.

My best guess is that you need to either try to grab more ambient with a longer SS, or set up something to bounce some of your strobe's light back onto the subject

You've given us no indication of your gear or set up so it's close to impossible to say what you should trying to change.

Aleness wrote in post #16072635
DigitalDon, once you start using punctuation it will become much clearer what you're trying to say, otherwise it feels like a brain dump. Really hard to understand what you mean.
Secondly, it looks like you don't understand what low key portrait is - it's not that everything is severely underexposed, you just need to really control the light and light up only that portion of the image that you'd like to accent - the rest should fall into black.
Here's a good write up:
http://ricknunn.com …w-i-shoot-lowkey-portrait

A brain dump is exactly what it is, this photography stuff is so complicated to me that I don't even know how to ask a question about it. Punctuation, I do the best I can, guess that is what I deserve for dropping out of school. That is why I said I am going to just read the forum and if I have a question, then, I will PM somebody when I see something that I want to ask about.

I am going to get back to the basics of myself and let my OCD figure photography out, it doesn't question my education it just keeps on, over and over until it figures it out, like it has everything else that I have ever learned. I am wasting practice time on trying to figure out how to ask a question in an un-educated language.

"Secondly, it looks like you don't understand what low key portrait is "

You got that right, seems to me that it not much more than adding fill light.
Thanks for the link.

Ordinarily 'high key' vs. 'low key' is not used to define the lighting of the scene, but it refers to the tonal balance observed in the final photograph. A photograph which has mostly dark tones, and very few light or white areas is 'low key'.
And you can shoot the low key photo with high intensity light or low intensity illumination...a mid-tone card placed in the scene would be rendered mid-tone regardless of the intensity of lighting, since you would adjust your exposure to suit the amount of light striking the scene. You can make a photo more 'low key', so that even the midtone card is rendered darker than its inherent brightness...but again, that has to do with Exposure, not lighting intensity.
It is possible to make things more 'low key' via placement of lighting...for example, a single Key (Main) light falling on the subject in such a way that little of the area visible to the lens is illuminated, and mostly the shadowed area is seen by the lens. The use of high contrast post processing settings would allow you to keep a bit of the photo 'white' but most of it would be lower in exposure and fall into the 'black' and 'dark grey', but this works far better with a subject that is inherently darker in tonal range, rather than a blonde bride in a white dress!

Just to reinforce Wilt's post, it's important to stress that both High Key and Low Key renditions have full tonal ranges as the norm. The High Key would feature mainly tones lighter than mid-tone but still have a full black somewhere. Similarly, a Low Key rendition would feature predominently tones darker than mid-tone but still have a full detailled white somewhere (quite often this would be nothing larger than the sclera of the subject's eyes).

If you want to be totally explicit, these would be termed High Major Key and Low Major Key respectively. A scene with mainly dark tones which didn't feature a full range from black through to white would be a Low Minor Key image; differentiatiing thus between not only mainly dark and mainly light images but also between those which have a full tonal range and those which have a curtailed range. Not surprisinly, it's equally possible to have an Intermediate Key image, in either Major or Minor variants.

More information can be found in Bruce Pendleton's useful 1984 book "Creative Still Life Photography" (ISBN 0-356-10102-9), especially the section on Design & Color. Much of the book is irrelevant to today's photographers as it deals with darkroom control, however, the sensitometry section is a very clear exposition of the various tonal renditions.

Worth mentioning that you need a good calibrated monitor to view and edit low key images. Otherwise you can't view it properly and will overcompensate some adjustments while completely missing others. Also consider LR auto adjustments as "guesses", they're not always what you might want.

CAPhotog wrote in post #16077813
Worth mentioning that you need a good calibrated monitor to view and edit low key images. Otherwise you can't view it properly and will overcompensate some adjustments while completely missing others. Also consider LR auto adjustments as "guesses", they're not always what you might want.

Thanks to all for your help

I have the Spyder 4 for calibrating, but don't use it as much as it recommends.
I think I have a lot of other issues, like, the cameras portrait, landscape modes has different settings, think I need to set all the sliders to zero for each mode.
Lightroom 4 has the slider settings at a default and I don't know how to zero out all the preset sliders, I am thinking if I start with everything zeroed out them maybe it might look more like the picture that the camera took.

Again thanks to all for your help.

DigitalDon wrote in post #16077954
Lightroom 4 has the slider settings at a default and I don't know how to zero out all the preset sliders, I am thinking if I start with everything zeroed out them maybe it might look more like the picture that the camera took.

Simply zero the sliders that you wish, then store your own Preset, and have LR apply your preset by default during Import of RAW images.

As for 'the picture that the camera took', the camera records RAW data but uses the selected Picture Style only for internal postprocessing and storage of the JPG preview image embedded into the RAW file for preview purposes...the RAW has no look, which is why RAW convertors (except for DPP) do not try to mimic the selected Picture Style appearance.

This is how I take low key portrait:

1. Adjust the camera so ambient light is underexposed (black picture on the back of the camera or close to it) - 1/200, ISO100 and F5.6 - F11 should do it in normally lit rooms.

2. Find a spot in the room far from walls.

3. Bring the light source close to the subject, the smaller the room, the closer I have to get. This is to keep the light from lighting up the walls.

4. Adjust the light so the bright part in the picture is correctly exposed (not under exposed!)

Lightroom gives you some room to play with: shadow/blacks down - highlight up/exposure down

This pic was taken in (large) normally lit room with white walls.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/71317677@N02/9​176940254/

Two pics, one low key and one high key. Notice either a exposed correctly. Look at the skin tones.

By the way, both old images shot on film.

This is what the picture looked like from camera to LR4 and the second picture is from LR4 with slider adjustments and a crop, the pic was taken around the 6th of june, Hope to try the others advice on taking low light photos today.
Why are the pictures running into each other, How do I put a space in betwwen them?

Wilt wrote in post #16078025
Simply zero the sliders that you wish, then store your own Preset, and have LR apply your preset by default during Import of RAW images.

As for 'the picture that the camera took', the camera records RAW data but uses the selected Picture Style only for internal postprocessing and storage of the JPG preview image embedded into the RAW file for preview purposes...the RAW has no look, which is why RAW convertors (except for DPP) do not try to mimic the selected Picture Style appearance.

Thanks Wilt
I never really played around in DPP, but I shot some pictures with the camera tethered to the computer and it saved the pictures to DPP, I was playing around with unsharp mask and sharpen sliders and was amazed at how much detail I could get with them, I think DPP does a better job at bringing out the details than LR4 does.