Original subtitles

Now going back to our cinematic lighting formula to fill in an important gap, the thill light and

how it helps to set a contrast ratio. so far they only fill light in our scene was the bounce from

our main light, if we wanted to reduce the overall contrast and fill in the shadows

ever so slightly we could go into the environment settings and boost the environment light strength

the lights are usually placed at the complementary angle to the key light to change the contrast

of the lighting, but here we can get away with the omnidirectional environment light.

and I would also warm up its tone... uh... because I imagine this room to be of warmer color due to

the sunlight reflected and also implying of the additional bounce from the table,

in this case a solid color for the environment is more than enough to control the fill, but if

we wanted to make it fancier, we could have used one of the environments, let's say from

Polyhaven which I love! you can choose from many different 360 Degrees spherical high dynamic

range panoramas, all of them are free and we will definitely explore these more sophisticated way of

controlling the ambient light among other things in the next chapter. so that again was a teaser :)

all right... uh... when the key light was our only light source some part of the scene simply

didn't receive any exposure, after adding the fill light though these underexposed shadowy areas

can be... well... filled in and that is essentially how we control the light versus dark contrast.

keeping the fill light pretty low leads to a dramatic change in exposure between lit and

shaded parts, something like 10 to 1 or 15 to 1, such dramatic contrast between key and fill is

called low key lighting. on the other end of the spectrum the fill light can become

so strong that it can virtually eliminate all the shadows or at least achieve much

lower contrast ratios, something like 2 to 1 that's called the high key lighting.

so ultimately it is all about increasing or decreasing the contrast ratio, for the chiaroscuro

contrasty look or on the other hand for the high key low contrast look or any number of stops in

between, you decide. my take on the balance between key and fill in this case is to aim for a medium

contrast, maybe leaning towards the dramatic side of the spectrum, slightly towards low key look.