3 Fashion Lighting Setups Every Photographer Should Know

In this video, John Gress demonstrates three distinctive lighting setups for fashion portraits, and honestly, each one creates such a different vibe that you'd never guess they were shot by the same photographer. From elegant soft light to dramatic hard light and vivid gel lighting, John breaks down the gear, positioning, and camera settings for each.

1. Soft Painterly Light

John's going for that refined, elegant feel you see in high-end fashion work here. He starts with a 190 cm Elinchrom indirect octabox as the key light, positioned camera right and feathered slightly to avoid lighting the floor.

Here's the cool part though – he's got this vintage Mole Richardson 412 Fresnel light in the shot, but instead of actually turning it on and cooking his model, Kyle, he sticks an Elinchrome One inside with two full CTO gels – a trick that creates the illusion of a working vintage movie light.

Initially, a V-Flat on camera left lifted the shadows too much, so he removed it, then later returned it folded in half for subtle shadow lift. A 4x4 ft flag was placed in front of the octabox to darken the lower frame. The backdrop was switched from green to a cool gray painted canvas for a more monochromatic tone.

Camera Settings:

• 1/200 sec

• f/8 (octabox), f/2.8 (Fresnel)

• ISO 100

• Lens: Canon RF 70–200mm f/4 at 70mm with 1/8 Black Pro-Mist filter

Lighting Tip: Feather your key light and block spill with flags to sculpt shadows and control the tone of the background and floor without losing softness on your subject.

Editing Note: In Capture One, John enhances Kyle's abs, darkens his left arm and pants, adjusts the floor color, and matches his feet tone to his overall skin tone for a cohesive look.

2. Bold Editorial Hard Light

This second setup leans into harder shadows and more edge – perfect for fashion editorials. John uses two strobes with grid reflectors. The main light is camera right, flagged with a V-Flat and 4x4 floppy to create deep background shadows. Then, a 30° gridded kicker placed camera left, behind the model, provides rim light without spilling onto the floor.

To freeze motion, John shifts the strobes into Action Mode, significantly shortening flash duration and allowing him to capture Kyle mid-jump without blur.

Camera Settings:

• 1/200 sec

• f/8

• ISO 100

Flash Durations:

• Standard mode: 1/454s

• Action mode: 1/13,597s

Lighting Tip: In studio flash setups, flash duration is more important than shutter speed for freezing motion. Use action or freeze mode to shorten the light pulse and capture sharp movement.

Editing Note: John uses one of Capture One's film styles to tint the shadows blue and warm up the skin tones, creating that classic editorial color grade.

3. Creative Gel Lighting

The last setup is pure color play. John starts with three strobes, each equipped with grid reflectors and fitted with Rosco color gels.

Initially, he tries cyan, magenta, and yellow gels, metering each at f/5.6 so their combined output measures f/8.3. The overlap creates secondary colors – blue, green, and red – but the mix doesn't work well on Kyle's skin. So John switches to red, green, and blue gels instead. These create cyan, magenta, and yellow where they overlap, which works much better.

The red and blue lights are placed on opposite sides to reduce blending; a fourth strobe on a low stand behind the model lights the crimson seamless backdrop.

Lastly, he experiments with wardrobe – a dark jacket for contrast, then a bright yellow polo that pops against the saturated background.