Building a Ghostly High-Key Image

I have been researching high-key photographs for quite a while. As many may know, I tend to lean more toward the dark side in my imagery so I was especially intrigued by challenging myself to do something that was predominantly white.

According to wikipedia, high-key lighting is a style of lighting for film, television, or photography that aims to reduce the lighting ratio present in the scene. High-key lighting is usually quite homogeneous and free from dark shadows.


In keeping with this as my guiding principal the ratios on this shot are all the same metered from left, front, right, and top. The background was 1 stop down from F14 metered from all the other locations. As seen above, I used 3 lights and a few reflectors to achieve the image. I used a Canon EOS 5D shooting RAW with the 85mmII f/1.2L lens... may favorite for portraits.


This is the original shot straight out of the camera with only minor color balance and exposure corrections made in the Adobe RAW importer.


This shot shows a minor level adjustment to wash out the background just a bit more. In retrospect I probably should have shot the background 1 stop up from everything else.


I love the channel mixer for black and white conversions. It creates such nice smooth texture and tonality based on the RGB values in the shot. Here you can see the numbers I used.


Here you can see the layers used in the construction of the final image. A pretty simple project IMO. It really boils down to starting with a nicely shots image to start with... and good talent that will do as instructed. My goal was to truly highlight the eyes and you can see how I did it with a series of white vignettes and my light painting layer.


And here we have the side-by-side comparison of the original with the final image. Thanks for visiting and please leave comments.