Shooting With A Softbox Grid For Dramatic Soft Lighting

On this video tutorial photographer Gavin Hoey takes a look at using a softbox with a grid and talks about the advantages and disadvantages of grid usage.

On a previous video Hoey looked at how softbox size effect soft light, on this video we take another step and look how you can influence the quality of light by adding a grid. What a grid does is make the light more directional – this isn’t necessarily a good thing but it really depends on what you are trying to achieve. As you can see from Hoey’s examples this tends to make images more dramatic looking.

On the second part of this video (around 8:05) Hoey take on of the images from this shoot and plays with it using Photoshop (Camera RAW) and make some minor adjustments including some local adjustments.

You can check out many more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section and check out some of Gavin Hoey’s other videos here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.