This is the third instalment in my 2021 Halloween Themed editorial.. The story continues:

“Red wanders into the forest. Hearing a strange sound she ventures towards it and sees a green glowing light and a strange lady hovering over a glowing cauldron.”

“The witch looks up and sees the candle awakening red to come closer. But when she is in range the witch casts the spell over read and she loses full control of yourself.”

The challenge with lighting this image was that I only wanted to bring the two characters out from the background but I did not want a lot of spill as that would ruin the impact. Therefore using a single large light source would have not achieved my look.

The lighting on the witch was the same as in the previous post and used a speed light in a small square soft box. I added a second Godox speed light in a 65 cm round softbox positioned camera right and just in front of Red.

The settings were slightly changed to f4.5 1/60s ISO100.

For the shot where the Witch puts the spell on Red, I changed positions and moved the Godox speed light in a 65 cm round softbox to be positioned camera left and just in front so that it would light up both of the subjects.

While the softbox was coming into the shot, I knew it would be an easy fix to remove it in post. Plus with it being so close to the subjects I knew that the fall off of light would be quite dramatic.

In post I cropped it down , darken down the background and then added a glow emanating from the cauldron using a mist brush that I had downloaded. I also applied a Moonlight Colour Look Up (LUT) which is one of the LUT’s that comes standard in Photoshop.

In the next post we move back inside for the sacrifice.