problems with dark skin
cclesue
Posts: 420
A while back there was a thread celebrating some to the effect "Black is Beautiful". I didn't pay attention as much as I should have. If I had I might not have the problems I now have.
In short what is the best way to either light or otherwise break the dark skin figures from a background? Especially if the background or set is dark.
Can someone refer me to that old thread? Maybe I can get some ideas from that. Or perhaps some favorite art works, e9ither photographic or graphic media.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Rim lighting...rim lighting...rim lighting...I cannot stress enough how amazing dark skin looks against a dark background with rim lighting.
If you have a light background, calling the character out with some backlighting helps, such as a soft spotlight from slightly above at an angle. Technically you could call it a hairlight, but it still does the job -
I recommend that you don't use WHITE light .... use color. It's more dynamic, and it makes dark skin look amazing.
Purples, Violets, Golds are particularly attractive
I think this is the one:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/368/black-is-beautiful-ii#latest
Also light the characters with an emissive plane or sphere for the key and fill lights, you can use whatever you want for a backlight. It's a more softer light that just envelops the skin and makes it look so much better than a spotlight or something to that effect.
Thanks for the thread reference. . .it will be very helpful.
Spows Nakia is one of those figure I "just had to have" and thought this old V4 Maman Brigit costume would work well but once i rendered it I realized I didn't know what to do with it. I'm and old Photoshop man and rarly ill render a whole scene in DAZ opting instead to build it in Photoshop. Thus I will render out a figure and wonder what to do with it after. In this case I remembered an image I did utilizing a live model (https://www.modelmayhem.com/portfolio/15458/viewall#/37027811) and decided to use tha back drop and came up with this:
Great thread and applicable advice in digital as well as the real world, BTW.
I just retired from ~ 30 years of commercail & motion picture lighting, & really loved the palette offered with darker skins. BTW, I used to teach color printing, & one of the demonstrations I loved doing when using a color analyzer, was to show that Black and Caucasion pigments were exactly the same, to nearly +/- .02CC, simply 2X or so more is all.
One of my last projects I really had a hoot working on if your interested:
Doc Acme - many props on your logic: "Earth can't be flat otherwise cats would have pushed everything off the edge!"!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One thing I have recently started doing is putting a haze behind the main character/subject of the scene....it helps lift them off the background.
You dont have to do anywhere near as much of it as I did in this image, this is just a clear example of what I mean (even a very subtle amount helps alot)
Rim lights or a backlight can help a lot. I second the idea of not using purely white light. You don't need to go to the other extreme and use vibrant colors (looks amazing in that render above, though). Even just shifting the color of your light from white to a pale blue (mimics daylight/sky) or an off-white or warm color can make a lot of difference for different skin tones. Also, don't overlook the usefulness of the Tone Mapping controls. Adjusting the Burn Highlights and Crush Blacks settings can give you a lot of control over your brightest and darkest areas in an image. For dark skin, I usually find that dialing down the Crush Blacks setting to 0.1 or 0 helps bring out details in areas that may be too dark or get lost in shadows. Here's a quick example. I used Celani 8 as the main model because her textures show the differences well, then tossed in Monique and Twosret's textures as examples as well.
I'm fond of Marshian's Fantasy & SciFi Lights if you want low-key lighting, it works for all skins but I find it looks particularly great on dark skins.
That's Makayla in the example.
the same way you would a light skin character
I think rim light has been mentioned before
I used as well emissive planes to create the light in this one, some fill lightts from front and left side
the challenge gets bigger when you have light and dark skin in one image, because the light skin will blow out at some point, so specifi lights for each of the tow character in thos image
I started the original BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL thread a couple of years ago. It reached capacity, so someone started a 2nd (and maybe a 3rd) thread with the same name.
Make the dark skin more reflective, not matte, so the skin shines a little to give whatever lights you have something to reflect off of. A hundred years ago stage actors (of all races) used makeup called GREASEPAINT, because the "grease" reflected the light spectacularly.
You can use a ghost light to give more illumination to just the dark skinned character. Just like with white skinned people, phtographers use "fill light" to brighten up areas in shadow.
You can use a coloured background to seperate the character from the background (like in all those old MGM musicals.)
Some PAs make dark skin characters with skin that reflects light better than others.
Different Black people have different brightnesses and color tonality to their skin - so get a variety of dark skin characters.
Just like women (and some men) of other races use a variety of makeup techniques to give their faces a "sculpted" look (Google Kim Kardashian) - contouring, highlighting etc. so do some Black women (and men) use cosmetics to enhance the appearance of their faces. A lot of real-world beauty products are formulated to "make your skin GLOW", to "make your hair SHINE", to give you "a RADIANT complexion". Cosmetics intended for a "night out" have more properties of light reflectance - the lipsticks and eye-shadows and blush are glossier and shinier. There are cosmetics that give your skin that "BLING" appearance by making it sparkle with subtle mettalic yet somehow diffuse ingrediants.
There's a couple million youtube videos showing exactly how to enhance the appearance of any face using cosmetics.
There's even "BODY BLING" that makes ALL your skin sparkle or glow like an angel.
Wedding photographers well know the challenges of lighting a white wedding gown next to a black tuxeedo.
She's standing on lava - so you could shine some lava-coloured lights upwards from ground level onto the character. From the expression on her face, she's likely facing a wall of fire too. And intense heat cause intense perspitation, which is highly reflective.
one thing I particularly love about pictures with dark skin is being able to use those vividly colorful bold backgrounds that would 'wash out' pale skin. I have a blast doing just that with Siya's promos:
I'm always amazed at how much a difference lighting makes on all skin types. I really love working with darker, more visibly reflective tones and shows and movies like Insecure (show) and Moonlight (move) are two examples of quite well done lighting for skin tones of varying shades. I remember one night club scene (Insecure) that was 'dark' but so well lit everyone looked great and clearly visible. Really Love (Netflix) is also another great visual reference. Lighting is something I still struggle with but just a few lighting changes made such a huge difference in my two example photos- still working on the bottom but headed in a better direction.
This comment is in no way aimed at anyone specific, because everyone has their own style. But you know, if you're having trouble lighting darker skin - shine a light on the faces. Take a spot light and make the beam narrow and focus it on the face. You will have probably noticed that even in the brightest sunlight, photo-journalists photographing people will use a fill-flash (which now automatically calculate an appropriate brightness) to throw light into the shadows on the FACES of celebrities and politicians - in broad daylight. Or use a ghost light. Fabiana produces some very useful lighting aids to subtly illuminate faces even when there are a lot of other light sources in the scene, or when the light levels in the scene are low.
Don't be afraid of the lights. Just set up your figure and then click one light after another, clicking UNDO in between ( or you may have to manually delete the unwanted lights from your SCENE tab ), until you get an image that you like. If you don't like any of them, then open another light set and click one light after another. If you find a light you like, but it doesn't illuminiate your figure correctly, like, the light is hitting the side of the figure, then change the pose of your figure to take advantage of the light, or rotate the figure and/or the camera, so the light is hitting it the way you like.
If you still don't like any of the images - buy more light sets.