<p>Everytime I'm in the studio using a large octabox or softbox, my portraits' highlights on the back of my 5D Mark III looks fine but then on the computer they are too bright. I love boosting contrast to add pop to my photos, but of course, this looks terrible when there's no headroom left for the highlights! I have no idea why my highlights are coming out so hot even before I get to editing. When I boost my contrast in post, I want my highlights to end up far from pure white, and I want my shadows to be deep and dark, but still not pure black.<br /><br />Here's a failed attempt at me trying to do this, but only had one light on the model (with a slight hair light behind) and I think lack of fill light ruined it:</p>
<p><img src="http://i.imgur.com/o7yuKba.jpg" alt="" width="533" height="800" /><br />Question: does lack of fill light (meaning using just 1 key light) create TOO much contrast in-camera, and make the shadows too dark? I find that when I use only one light for portraits, the picture already has the amount of contrast I want in the final edit, so I cant even push it at all. I guess what I'm going for is a low contrast raw picture, so I can grade it and boost contrast to my hearts content.<br /><br />I found images from a great photographer who has the lighting I'm after, and he uses only natural light from windows, I'd love to figure out how he has deep contrast but still such smooth highlight rolloff after editing, and of course I want to do this with no more than 2 lights in a studio:</p>
<p><img src="http://i.imgur.com/YHGdJPV.jpg" alt="" width="1066" height="800" /><br /><br /><img src="http://i.imgur.com/av9l0Hp.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="1078" /><br /><br /><br /> Thank you guys so much for the help and I apologize if I broke any rules, I mean no harm!</p>