One of my favorite shots from the Gruber Family Shoot was the following shot of Emma.

The shot was done in the shade of a giant tree to my left. I purposely chose this location since the tree would block the harsh light of the setting sun while still illuminating the background sufficiently.

The problem with the shade though was that it cast strange shadows on Emma’s face. Therefore, I needed to light up Emma using my speedlights. I used my SB-600, shot through an umbrella to my right (triggered via CLS/AWS), as my main light and used my on-camera SB-700, with diffuser, to fill in the shadows on the side of her face.

All-in-all, the lighting setup can be seen in the diagram below.

Since I wanted more of the warm look from the setting sun though, I set the flashes to fire at -0.7EV (TTL-BL) so they wouldn’t overpower the natural lighting already there. Also, since Emma had a white shirt on, I purposely under-exposed the picture as the camera would have otherwise blown out her shirt with the flashes due to the dark background.

Since I shot without gelled flashes though, the entire foreground of the image came out with a dull blue look as the camera defaulted to the daylight white-balance settings despite shooting the flashes at a -0.7EV (TTL-BL). I had chosen not to use flash gels since:

1. They are a pain to use!
2. I wanted the warmer look that would result be correcting the white-balance to the blue-ish flash in post-processing.

Because of the above coloring issue, I took the RAW image and changed the white-balance to flash in post-processing. I then fine-tuned the image’s colors (using Nik Color Efex’s “Remove color-cast” tool) to remove the color-cast in her white shirt. Finally, I tweaked some of the color, brought out the eye’s, and smoothed out her skin (poor Emma actually had a skin rash so I hid that as well!). You can see the before and after affects below.

That’s it!