Lighting Setup

How to Build an Over-Under Beauty Lighting Setup (And Why One Light at a Time Is the Only Way to Work)
Video Tutorials

How to Build an Over-Under Beauty Lighting Setup (And Why One Light at a Time Is the Only Way to Work)

There’s a moment in almost every portrait shoot where the lighting feels close but not quite right, and you end up chasing your tail, adjusting everything at once and making it worse. I spent an embarrassing amount of time doing exactly that before I started treating each light as its own separate problem to solve. When I came across this KelbyOne tutorial with RC Concepcion breaking down a two-light over-under setup, I recognized the workflow immediately, not because I’d seen it taught this way before, but because it’s the method I had to learn the hard way after too many frustrating test shots.

How to Read a Beauty Lighting Setup From a Single Catchlight (And Recreate It)
Video Tutorials

How to Read a Beauty Lighting Setup From a Single Catchlight (And Recreate It)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from receiving a beauty image to retouch when you have no idea how it was lit. You can see something is off in the skin tones, or the shadows feel muddy, but you can’t diagnose it because you weren’t in the room. Understanding lighting setups, even as a retoucher, changes how you read an image entirely. It tells you which shadows are intentional, which highlights belong there, and where the photographer was going emotionally with the shot.