Butterfly lighting is a portrait lighting order where the key light is placed above and centred directly to the subject’s face. Evidently it creates a shadow under the subject’s nose that creates a butterfly like shape. In other cases, butterfly lighting can also be known as ‘Paramount lighting,’ which is named for classic Hollywood glamour photography.

The set up for butterfly lighting.

Own experiments of butterfly lighting

Experiment 1:

Editing process:

For this photo I wanted to make the picture less bright and exposed, so i decreased exposure (-0.70) to make it less lit, increased contrast (+54) to sharpen the image, i decreased, highlights (-26) to make lighter parts of image darker, shadows (-40) to recover lost details, whites (-51) to strip the whites in the pictures and blacks (-67) to make image darker.

This is all I did to the image to enhance that butterfly lighting that was not as evident as it is now. I made this overly exposed picture a representation of butterfly lighting.

Before (left) and After (right)

Experiment 2:

Editing process: For this picture I decided to keep it just as it is. I didn’t want to change it as I thought that it represented that butterfly shape. I think that the picture looks great and doesn’t need any type of editing.

Experiment 3:

Editing process: For this picture, I decided that if I desaturated it to -100 it would help highlight the shadow under the subjects nose that butterfly lighting is know for. I also wanted to desaturate it to make it black and white to create more diversity in my work as I think that it is important to have diversity like coloured and desaturated photos because it shows you can be creative.

Before (left) and After (right)

Experiment 4:

Editing process: For this picture I decided to keep it just as it is. I didn’t want to change or alter anything within the picture as I thought that it represented that butterfly shape where it shows a well lit face with a shadow below nose that creates that butterfly shape. I think that the picture looks good and does not need any type of editing to it.

Presentation of outcomes

Evaluation and Critique:

Overall I think that my pictures look great. I was able to show that butterfly lighting where under the subject nose a butterfly like shadow is created through the use of a key light and a reflector.

I think that I created a diverse set of picture where it includes, black and white picture, different type of emotions and experimenting with the editing in light room.

When it comes to that bright and illuminated face, I think that I did really well with showing that illuminated face because as seen in my final outcomes, the subjects face is very illuminated and its evident that, that butterfly like shadow is created under the subjects nose.

However something that I could have improved was showing that butterfly lighting. I feel that in some of my pictures that butterfly like shadows isn’t as evident as I would like it to be. As seen on experiment 4, the butterfly shadow is barely there. I could improve this by moving the reflector around and taking pictures and seeing which position the reflector is set at, produces the best butterfly lighting.

Lastly another improvement my photos could’ve had was a darker background. When I was researching about butterfly lighting, lots of the pictures I saw the background was black and not white. I believe that it is easier to show that butterfly shadow using a black background instead of white. So next time I will try taking pictures with a darker background and I can do that by using a black back drop or lowering the ISO in the camera to around 100-125