Excellent Tips on Lighting Darker Skin Tones by PetaPixel

A Look at How HBO’s ‘Insecure’ Lights Black Actors so Well

One of the things I noticed about Insecure was how beautifully lit everything was all of the time. It was great to find this video that showed how intentional that was by Ava Berkofsky (Insecure’s Director of Photography). These days experimenting with color, skin tones, and lighting is something I’m having a lot of fun doing and even though the video linked is mainly about photography/cinematography I got a lot out of it as an artist.

Another person that does an exceptional job of lighting darker skin is Eric Wilkerson.

I just want to point out something about how Eric Wilkerson handles the dark skin complexions in the TRISTAN STRONG cover. When lighting a person with dark complexion, the answer is not LIGHTENING THE SKIN, it's understanding how light reflects off of dark skin. pic.twitter.com/U47oZdhyk2

— Nilah Magruder @ HomeCon (@nilaffle) February 8, 2019