【Shoost Tips】Lighting Tips to Make Your Character Stand Out! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

In today's Shoost Tips, I'd like to talk about lighting. Well, to be more precise, it's about brightness, which might be slightly different from lighting, but bear with me.

Have you ever experienced your character not standing out when you combine the background and character in Shoost? For example, like in the image below.

At first glance, it seems to blend well with the background, but the character is too integrated into the background and doesn't stand out. This is because there is only ambient light and no lighting to illuminate the character.

Think about live-action filming. Even outdoors, there’s often additional lighting specifically for the subject, separate from the ambient light.

Similarly, let's adjust the brightness by imagining a light source that illuminates the character separately from the ambient light.

Controlling Brightness

First, consider where attention is focused in your image.

Lower the saturation of the image to make it black and white. This allows us to see only the brightness. As a basic principle, attention tends to be drawn to areas with high brightness or high contrast.

When you make it black and white, you can see that the background is brighter than the character, so the attention goes to the background. This might require a bit of getting used to, but just think of it as where your eyes are drawn to at first glance.

Once you identify the focal points, start adjusting the brightness to make the character the focus.

1. Reduce the value of Blend Auto Color by half.

2. Slightly darken the brightness of the background.

3. Slightly increase the brightness of the character.

Compared to before the adjustment, the character seems to stand out more.

Finally, let's restore the saturation.

Since lowering the Blend Auto Color makes the ambient light on the character a bit weaker, use the Color Filter to add a little bit of the background color.

Comparing the images, you can see that the character stands out more and draws attention compared to before the adjustment.

This technique can be used not only in Shoost, but also in any visual creation, so please give it a try!