Master Edgy Lighting

Create a portrait that looks processed without the processing. Jason Parnell-Brookes ditches the computer in favour of using coloured lights to capture the effect in-camera

- Jason Parnell-Brookes

With the advent of popular smartphone apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic, image processing is now commonplace. Whether it’s clicking a single filter on your phone, or adjusting curves and levels sliders in Photoshop, fiddling with the colours can have a dramatic effect on the feel of an image.

Limiting the tonal range and colour palette of an image in this way is great, but we reckon it’s more satisfying to create similar effects straight out of the camera. All we need are two flashguns placed either side of a model, with some coloured gels placed in front of the lights. With a bit of clever placement we can separate the light that falls on our model’s face to mimic the processed effect.