From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Refining lighting for Portrait mode images - Photos for OS X Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

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Refining lighting for Portrait mode images

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- If you're shooting images on an iPhone, and it has two or three lenses, it can actually use the multiple lenses to calculate depth. This gives you an image that's computational and allows for additional post processing. Let's go back here to the grid view and I'll select the album called Chernobyl. Now you can use this in a couple of different ways. When shooting in portrait mode as long as the camera is close enough, whether you're shooting in selfie mode or regular mode, it will latch on and identify your primary subject. Notice here as we make adjustments, it behaves like a regular image. But at the bottom here are some additional controls indicating that we are in portrait mode. This allows you to turn this mode on or off. And you see that it's pretty cool effect. When this is off, I'm not adjusting the depth of field and it's showing me the full depth of field here. We'll tackle this option more in a moment. But at the bottom here are different lighting modes. You see there's the natural light and the studio light, which further lights just your subject but leaves the background alone. There is also a contour light that tends to emphasize shadows and edges. The next three I don't find very useful, but there are special effects. A stage light that attempts to blackout your background, which typically seems odd to me unless you're just trying to do a studio portrait and a black and white version of that, or one that takes the background to pure white. These modes are really useful for head shots or if you're looking to dramatically simplify or even remove the background. Unfortunately, there's no tool to adjust this lighting level or change it to really dial that in. Let's go back here to a different image. I'll press the space bar and I want to show you how this comes into play. If you're careful when you set the image, you will be able to dictate where it's going to light. So in this case, I made sure that this hanging object was picked up in the portrait. Let's go ahead and turn off the depth of field there for now, and just changed the lighting. And you see how these first three options give us a slightly different effect to emphasize the subject. Let's go here to another and again, notice how we can change the lighting on our subject. In this case, it didn't just recognize the subject it also recognize some of the foreground objects. So it really just depends what's identified as the subject but these lighting options can be quite beneficial if you like to enhance things. Remember, this can work in conjunction with everything else. So you are free to of course experiment with definition and sharpness to help with your edges. But this additional hit of light can really bring things to life and allows for some extra and easy to adjust creativity.

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