adding eye light without affecting scene lighting?

[vonkuttenberg]

hello any suggestions or tips for making eyes to pop out of picture without affecting lighting setup? i am strugling with two situations and have to often correctin postproduction...
1) dark lowlight scene where any frontal light change lighting to talent face significantly and affect mood.
2) bright day sunlight where we bounce or use directly thru diffusion 2,5-4kW hmi for keylight and than nothing like soft bounce affect eyes at all.

i heard some tricks about using spot led light mounted to camera etc (more connected to dark or lowlight scene), or is it just about finding angle and use some foamcore/bounce boards?...

what tricks or lighting workflow do you use for eyes separately?

 

[Bern Caughey]

I'm on set so can't answer in depth. There are innumerable ways to achieve this effect & suggest you search CML for the terms 'Eyelight', 'Catchlight', or 'Obie', but the basics are a relatively dim source used close to the subject. The size & shape of the source is usual determined by the effect your after, but sometimes constrained, if for example someone is wearing glasses.

 

[Grug]

The thing to remember with a catch light is that it's simply a reflection on the glossy surface of the eyeball. So you don't need to be firing a light directly at talent to achieve it, you just need something illuminated within the reflected radius of their eyes.

My go-to trick these days is generally a small lighting umbrella 24-36" in diameter (either a white-bounce or shoot-through), with a small battery powered LED illuminating it faintly. You can just leave this setup permanently on a stand and move it around to wherever you need a catchlight.

I've tried the diffed-down on camera light approach, but find I'm always having issues catching the reflection of that on-camera light in talent's eyes.

 

[legrevedotcom]

The thing to remember with a catch light is that it's simply a reflection on the glossy surface of the eyeball. So you don't need to be firing a light directly at talent to achieve it, you just need something illuminated within the reflected radius of their eyes.

My go-to trick these days is generally a small lighting umbrella 24-36" in diameter (either a white-bounce or shoot-through), with a small battery powered LED illuminating it faintly. You can just leave this setup permanently on a stand and move it around to wherever you need a catchlight.

I've tried the diffed-down on camera light approach, but find I'm always having issues catching the reflection of that on-camera light in talent's eyes.

This...

I never really liked the on camera approacv except for very few cases or if the set design allowed for it to make sense. I would prefer the eyelight to mimic the actual lighting source and so the umbrella idea becomes quite flexible and good.