Rembrandt Light and Tonal Painting.
How I create my Rembrandt lighting signature look.
The Masterclass Goal: Create beautiful tone and colour palettes.
My tonal painting and Rembrandt lighting technique serve two essential purposes. – From a visual principle perspective, it’s essential to establish visual order, structure, and emphasis in the image to achieve visual efficiency. From an aesthetic perspective, tonal painting creates a beautiful palette of rich, subtle tones, giving the image a richness that photographs often lack; a palette of tones the camera alone can never create. It’s an ideal technique for transforming the image while preserving the underlying three-dimensional illusion of reality. – A beautiful way to enhance the light, mood, drama and atmosphere in pictures, while creating your own unique photographic vision and style to any subject you shoot.
Benefits for your Photography.
1. Why it’s important to use the technique. We see and respond to the world using light – therefore, we respond emotionally when we see a sense of light in pictures. Light creates the photograph’s emotional mood, drama, and atmosphere; it creates the story and psychological feel. This technique enhances what the camera records.
2. Create order, structure and emphasis. Beyond composition, a camera captures everything with equal importance. A painter would control the visual importance of the painting’s content, but a camera can’t. This technique allows you to create what the camera can’t: create visual order, structure and emphasis; remove chaos.
3. Beautiful tonal and colour palettes. Painters use limited colour palettes for visual cohesion and self-expression. A camera records all the colours of the subject, which often creates a feeling of no cohesion. Combined with a beautiful, subtle palette of greys, this technique creates a uniform feel of tonal richness and visual cohesion.
4. Rich shadow detail. To create impact, photographers often use contrast, making the shadows very dark, too dark. Once shadows turn black and lose detail, they are perceived as unrealistic. The trick is to make the shadows dark to retain the impact contrast gives, but retain the detail that keeps them real. This solves the problem.
5. Photographic style. Tonal painting is a great foundation for developing your own personal vision and style. – It’s not the technique alone that dictates your style, but a combination of how you apply this technique to the subjects you enjoy shooting. Your personal style is a combination of many factors, not just a single technique.
Requirements & Free Video Recordings.
Sessions are held online via Zoom video conferencing. I will email you a meeting link before the session, and sessions are recorded live as documentation. – Please note: These recordings and their content remain the copyright and intellectual property of David Osborn. – They are for your private use only and may not be shared, reproduced, or used commercially, including on social media. Enrollment constitutes your agreement to these terms. I teach using Photoshop; the concepts taught can be applied to any image-editing software. Photoshop just allows greater control and better creative freedom.
David Osborn Photography
69 Grange Gardens, Southgate,
London N14 6QN, England.
UK +44 (0) 771 204 5126
David@DavidOsbornPhotography.com
Let’s Talk.
Let’s chat live on a video call first, free of charge and with no obligation, to answer any questions and concerns you may have before you make any booking. – Please email me, and we will arrange a date to talk in person.