THE "GOLDEN HOUR IMITATION."

[hombredelmar]

Hello all again!
There are a lot of discussions about the “golden hour” but I have not found any posts about golden hour imitation in the postproduction. Wanted to know how you guys deal with the situation.
Thank you in advance for your participation!!!

 

[runnah]

It's not hard to do color wise but the shadows always give away the editing.

 

[Overread]

Few thoughts:

Golden hour results in several key properties;

1) Golden colour - well the specific colour varies, but its a more golden/yellow or might even be a touch of red on some days. Of all the elements this is easier to create because you can do so; if you shot in RAW, by just adjusting the white balance sliders.
If you want to do it in camera you can get gels to colour the light from a flash unit to mimic the effect (they are also used when you want to use flash for fill lighting during the golden hour - using the gels means that you've basically got one colour of light (or near enough) rather than golden light and then whiter flash light.

2) Soft lighting - lower angle means more atmosphere breaks up the sunlight; this results in a nice soft even lighting over the subject areas illuminated by the sun. Not easy to reproduce if you've got a harsh midday shot; but some careful editing and specific area editing (using layer-masks) and you might be able to take the edge of some harshness in shots to re-create a likeness.

3) Low angle of light - You really have to have this or not; you can't easily recreate this effect (I say easily, anything is possible with photoshop, but processes like this can be far more time than its worth).

4) As a result of point 3; the low angle means really long shadows behind the subject. Again very hard to re-create in editing if you don't have it there already.

If you have access to flash lighting setups you can see that many of the above could be mimicked with some effort and time. However it might take longer than you think to set it all up correctly; especially if you want to take shot after shot on the setup.

 

[JoeW]

Actually, I'm one of those luddites and old geezers that would create golden hour shots in the shot rather than post-production. I'm not being snarky here. Say you've got an overcast day, a model, a still pool of water and a hankering to create a golden hour feel to your shot. Pull out your speed light (off-camera) and gels or filters to add an orange tint to the water and a golden glow to the model's skin. Position the speed light low to mimic the angle of the sun and create longer shadows. If the only surface you have is of the water, then put the speed light really low and toss a pebble in the water to create ripples (with shadows behind each little ripple).

 

[Derrel]

It's not hard to do color wise but the shadows always give away the editing.

Yeah...the shadows need to be long, and the light source needs to obviously be pretty LOW in relation to the subjects. You might have some success faking golden hour by gelling a flash with strongish CTO, and moving it back fairly far, so it is a hard light source; golden hour light is CRISP, not soft and diffused. I've seen a couple articles where good commercial pro's were able to create pretty realistic golden hour celebrity/lifestyle stuff, but the backgrounds were also lighted by massive amounts of artificial flash, and were confined to typically like one building or outbuilding...not say "a neighborhood" or "the whole beach area", but more like a smaller area, maybe 40 x 100 feet total--because, if there are no long, low-shadows, it looks totally faked.

 

[Forkie]

Might be able to fake it with a gold reflector, too. If you're clever and shoot so you can't see the shadows of other objects you might be able to get away with it.