For the most part, cameras these days can do everything you want and need if you’re shooting stills. The majority of photographers who do work with their cameras photograph people. And the ideology for years has been the archaic thoughts that often come around all the way from the film days. That’s to say that you need to shoot photos and then spend hours or days working on the images. There’s a beautiful artistic struggle there; but for your own mental health, you don’t need to constantly struggle. After a while, it loses its romance and the fire turns into an ember. So let’s make your life a bit easier: here’s how to make skin tones look incredible in-camera.
This article is presented by LUMIX.
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Understanding White Balance
Fact: most people use auto white balance and then just tell themselves that they’ll figure it all out later. But that’s not always conducive to the shooting process. We all get setbacks and a much better use of your creative energies could be spent getting it right in-camera in the first place. LUMIX cameras have a wonderful understanding of this concept.
Scroll around on Instagram, Reddit, or any other social media platform. You’ll see tons of images with a warm look to them. Warm photos just feel and look better to all of us. So you could set the auto white balance setting on your LUMIX camera to skew warmer, but that’s often not enough. Instead, we recommend selecting the shade or flash white balance setting.
With a camera like the LUMIX S9, you’ll get access to only the shade setting because the camera doesn’t have a hot shoe that can work with traditional flashes. But with other wonderful options like the S5II, you can choose the flash setting. This then gets you to a place where the feel is warmer and the skin tones look much better.
In most high end advertising, skin tones also often look warmer and the white balance of the rest of the image is typically edited to find a sense of normalcy.
All of this stems from the original film origins where film was white balanced to daylight. LUMIX’s history draws from Panasonic’s long-time forays into the cinema and video world where video was often made to look warmer in general from the 5500K white balanced cinema film that has been around and is still used even today.
Real-Time LUT
Thankfully, you can get the looks of old-school films with your LUMIX camera. When you combine the white balance with some of your favorite presets of LUTs loaded onto your LUMIX S9 or with LUMIX S5II, then you’ll be able to create images that look like they’re straight out of the movies or have the film-look that everyone loves. You can also make the photos look like early digital — which everyone loves these days.
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A Few Tips for Exposures
Here are a few tips on making the most of film LUTS and white balance with your LUMIX Camera;
- Overexpose just a bit, brightened skin often looks better in-camera for anyone. And it can also help with softening the look.
- LUMIX cameras can help you control the dynamic range of the images and also shoot photos with dual ISO settings.
- Try shooting photos with even lighting when possible. The easiest way to do this is by reading the light meter instead of always just looking at the exposure preview
- Try keeping your ISO to a constant setting, it doesn’t need to jump around everywhere
- Real Time LUT also has the option to add in film-grain. We always recommend that people do this for a better and more organic look.
Give these a try for yourself once you pick up a brand new LUMIX camera.