#yes the m*le n*dity was necessary

[nectar-cellar]

TS3 Lighting Tutorial: Backlighting

A cool lighting setup I came up with for photo studio portraits!

Inspired by @rebouks and @tau1tvec TS4 CAS lighting mods ✨

You need:

Buhudain invisible lights (I always use the “wide spot” versions)

Murano photo backdrop

Pose Player & some poses of your choice

Reshade, Gshade, or a photo editor of your choice 

1. Build a closed rectangular room with a roof covering it. Pose your sim and put them in the center. (Use the moveobjects on cheat.)

2. Position the lights as shown in pic 3 and 4. You can adjust the light color and intensity in Live Mode by clicking on them, or Ctrl + Shift + left click on them in Buy Mode.  

3. Recolor the photo backdrop to pitch black, and put it around your sim to make sure the room’s walls are not visible. Use more than 1 if necessary, they seamlessly intersect. Murano’s photo backdrop is also technically a light, so make sure you either turn it off, or play around with the light’s color and intensity to create an effect you like.

4. Find a good angle, turn your Reshade/GShade on, and snap your pic. Adjust the contrast, brightness, exposure, and color settings in a photo editor to make it pop even more. You can download my Reshade preset on my downloads page if you want, it works in Gshade as well. 

What does each light do?

The white-colored lights are there to provide a general brightness to the sim and the room, and to offset the intense colored lights. Without the white lights, the sim would be completely lit in red & magenta. You can turn up the intensity, or add more white lights if more brightness is needed.

The red and magenta-colored lights are there to provide intense color on the side and outline of the sim, for a neon backlit effect.

Tips

- You can play around with each light’s position, intensity and color to create different effects. For example, you can remove some lights on one side of the sim to create more dramatic shadows. Or remove some white lights so that the colored lights are stronger.

- You can make the colored lights monochromatic, or you can pair them in analogous colors (i.e. red and orange, red and magenta), or you can pair them in complementary colors (i.e. red and green, blue and yellow). 

- In Buy mode, hold the Alt key, and click and drag your sim to rotate them in small increments, to make sure the light hits them exactly right.

I hope this tutorial gives you some fun ideas for taking pictures! 💗