Why Soft Light?

At every shoot and production, we take on at Render Perfect Productions, your video marketing experts in Baltimore, Maryland, the goal is to always use as much soft light as possible. Why soft light, though? What makes it so special? Well, let’s take a look at the ins and outs of soft lighting today.

Forgiving Light

Crucially, it is less easy to make a ‘mistake’ than if you are working with hard light. Put a hard light in the wrong place and you will get ugly shadows, particularly on faces. Put a soft light in the wrong place and it won’t look great, but it won’t be stand out as an error. Soft light is easy.

Soft light is splendid for a naturalistic drama when you don’t want it to look ‘lit’. Watch hard-lit films and TV from the 60s and 70s, particularly low-budget ones, and they look to our eyes unacceptably ‘fake’. There’s an unnatural sheen to everything. Multiple shadows abound, actors seem to have a back-light that follows them wherever they go and light fittings on sets (practicals) cast shadows when they are supposed to be giving out light.

When Did it Become an Option?

Because soft light is inefficient, it didn’t really become an option until around the 1980s when film stocks and cameras became more sensitive. In the movie heyday of the 40s, when studios were huge and lenses and film stocks slow (Technicolor had an ISO rating of around 5), 10Kw tungsten lights and carbon arc brutes were essential. To work at those lighting levels with soft sources would have needed an unfeasible amount of power. For this reason, films lit mainly by hard light may look old-fashioned or theatrical, but if you try to emulate a classic Hollywood studio look, be warned: those guys knew what they were doing — parodying it is one thing, emulating is another.

Hard light comes from a point source — generally the filament of a lamp or a source that is focused to a point. This means the lamps are inherently smaller and more efficient.

The most common form of documentary lighting until the turn of the century was open face quartz (tungsten-iodine) lights — ‘redheads’ and ‘blondes’ — as they are cheap, lightweight and give out a lot of light. And heat. Used indiscriminately for classic 3-point lighting (key/fill/back) they look… well, they look like classic 3-point lighting — the shot looks ‘lit’.

Is it Soft Light?

What about the light sources themselves? At the lower end, LED lights seem to have taken over. LED panels are convenient, efficient in terms of power and cool to run. Some let you dial in the color temperature and even have add-on special effects to emulate fire flicker and TV screens. Yes, they’re great.

But LEDs have their problems too. In the past, color rendering was poor, but in the last couple of years they have improved enormously and any LED from a reputable manufacturer should not give you color problems (but cheap Chinese knock-offs on eBay probably will). But here’s the thing — unless they are large, they are not really that soft.

I’ve seen LED lights about the size of a paperback book laughably branded as ‘soft lights’ — well, they’re not (unless you are photographing miniatures). I’m also puzzled by ‘soft box’ diffusers that are hardly bigger than the lamp itself — putting a diffuser a couple of inches away from the source will not make that light softer either unless the diffuser is substantially bigger. Putting layer upon layer of diffusion on a light doesn’t make it softer either — it just makes it dimmer. Soft light has to radiate from a large surface area.

When to use Hard Light?

But here’s the great thing about hard light: it can be magic. It stresses colors and textures; objects snap into life.

Not only is it efficient, but you can park your light a long way away from your shot and your foreground and background have relatively similar light levels. Do this with a soft light closer to the scene and the light will fall off noticeably. A powerful light, further away, creates more even lighting than a weaker source closer to the subject.

It is often said that you can think of the art of a DoP as deciding where the shadows are — it is more about taking light away than adding it in. You can have fun with hard light, you can control it. Barn doors help control where the light falls and flags will cut the light cleanly, creating hard shadows exactly where you want.

You can play with those classic film noir tricks: shafts of light through blinds and shutters and looming silhouettes. You can create drama.

Problems with Soft Light

Soft light brings its own problems. First, soft light is very inefficient. A soft (diffused) source has to emanate from a large surface area, like through a diffusion frame or bounced off a white reflector, typically, an 8’ by 4’ sheet of expanded polystyrene or foam core. This not only means a lot of light is wasted, but the light source itself is, almost by definition, big and awkward.

Soft light is hard to control; you can’t flag it or focus it. In a small room, a couple of soft sources may just flood everything and the result is something very bland. It’s unlikely to be offensive, but it may just be flat and dull.

Ideally, we want light to be soft without being flat — we want contrast; we want to have inky black shadows and that flattering wrap-around softness — and that is almost impossible in small spaces with white walls. Natural is one thing, drab is quite another.

Hard Sources Make for Great Soft Light

You can make a hard light soft, but you can’t make a soft light hard. One light that is a favorite of mine seems to have fallen out of fashion — the 2KW Blonde. A simple, open-face light with a quartz bulb, you can pick one up on eBay for under $100 (or rent for about $15 day). Robust, lightweight, they give out a lot of light and bulbs seem to last forever. They are 3200K in color temperature, but there’s enough light output that you can easily add a blue or a half-blue gel to match daylight sources and, as far as color rendition is concerned, that light is about as good as it gets. Blast them through a window to simulate daylight, light up buildings in night exteriors. If you want soft light, aim them at an 8’ x 4’ sheet of poly. If you want to light up a room in a quick and dirty way, bounce them off the ceiling (please, don’t just flood the ceiling with a light, but choose an area on the ceiling to be your light source). A Blonde and an 800W Redhead will run safely off one 13Amp UK mains socket. Yes, they are power hungry and get hot, but that is really the only drawback.

And if you are really low-budget or no-budget, it can be cheaper than that. Industrial quartz lights are cheap and efficient and, although they are not as easy to control or position, can give you hard or soft light using the same principles. Ingenuity here is key. After all, a reflector is just a big white board, a flag is a big blackboard, and a lamp is just something that holds a filament. The magic is not the equipment itself but knowing where to put it. Professional kit just makes that task a lot easier.

Of course, as I’m sure some readers are desperate to point out, it’s not either/or. All DoPs worth their salt use a combination of hard and soft sources and everything in-between. And our notion of what looks natural and what looks dull, what looks dramatic and what looks contrived and what looks cinematic and what looks nostalgic is in constant flux. That’s what makes it interesting.

About Render Perfect Productions:

Render Perfect has been built from the ground up to service growing businesses and help them realize their full visual storytelling and digital marketing potential. We’ve created a service offering and skill-set that spans video production, post-production, motion graphic design, 3D animation, web development, and video marketing strategy. Our insight and experience allow us to help clients make better planning decisions and get more out of their video production effort.