For 25 years I was a commercial photography mainly working in fashion and entertainment portraits (aka headshots). Now retired, I am 3 months into trying to do the same in Poser. I cant seem to locate my main 3 tools, other than my Nikon.

1  A 4' x 6' white photographers "softtbox" for direcly above the camera.

1. A 36" Round gold reflector placed on a stool in front of the models face
2. A sleeved scoop neck standard dance leotard.

I work mainly with v4 and gnd4 in particular as I like the skin texture realisim along with the wonder bra morph. but am open to switching charactors if need be.

Reasons for these in real life

1. unparaled softness provided by the two layers of diffusion in a tru proffessional soft box. although the lighting is flat with little dramatc "modeling", it is increadibly forgiving with the female face and creates a glow that can not be created any other way.

2. the gold relector reflects the softbox up filling in even more shadows with a nice gold/tanned touch.

3. Both the Softbox and the underneath th face reflecter provide a remarkable set of "catch lights" that in real life provide po and carisma and in poser would provide a lot of realisim and "soul" to the model.

4. In a a headsot, color, lines and patterns can be distracting to the viewer. you should always be drawn to the subjects eyes first, even if they are naked. lol then you have succeded!  the black leotard(and it almost looks like the top to an evening gown or little black dress. and the scoop of the neckline draws the veiwer up to the face nicely.The eye is drawn to the lightest area of the picture, make it the face around the eyes,(even if they are african american. If your good all you need is these tools and 18% editorial grey background (created on a backlayer in photoshop) and you have a celebrity portrait of someone, less talented beauty or portrait photographer use all kinds of backgrounds and props to cover their lack of skill. You want people to say "she is so beautiful" or "hes handsome"....you dont want people to say what a great and creative picture luckly I learned that early in my career. Same can apply with your rendering of a castle. ie "what a beautiful castle!"

Does anyone know where I can find these tools in the poser world? sorry for the long explination, but I needed to explain my method to the madness, so you understand what I need and why it needs to be so. You want people to say "she is so beautiful" or "hes handsome"....you dont want people to say what a great and creative picture luckly I learned that early in my career
Thanks in Advance
Steven

Posers lighting is nothing at all like photographic lighting.  It doesn't bounce off reflectors and getting nice soft shadows will hammer your render time.  You are going to need to do a lot of cheating to get anything close to what you are looking for (and to be honest, I'm not even sure Poser will be able to do what you are looking for)

There isn't really an equivalent to a softbox although you could probably fake it using an array of spotlight aimed to suit and using soft shadows - that's going to be where the render hit comes from I expect.

For the reflector, you'll need a spot light coloured to suit and pointing up at the face but you'll need to play with the shadow settings (or possibly turn them off altogether)

I gave up on Poser to try and do decent lighting - I now render pretty much everything in Vue which has much better lighting models - it supports Global Illumination and Global Radiosity (bouncing light around) and the lights are a lot easier to work with.

Good luck on your quest though !!

Attached Link: adp001

Take a look at Render Studio for Poser over at RuntimeDNA.

Mike

Wow, thank you all for your quick responses and ideas for work around. sounds like ill have to do some experimenting with tese clues.
Thanks
Steven

One thing you might want to look at is getting hold of [Digital] Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn - you can get it from Amazon and it goes into a lot of detail about the theory of CG lighting

post a photo of the softbox, the reflector and other studio props.  it's possible to do this in poser to some extent, but is only mentioned briefly in the poser python manual, hence almost nobody knows how to do it.  the leotards are probably available for sale or free download here.

Thank Miss Nancy
Ive looked all over but cant find the leotard.  Ill photogragh the set up. What would be the best way to post it. Alink to my ftp, or can we upload images?
Thanks
Steven

Images can only be uploaded to the gallery; for the forum, use FTP.

upload the jpeg img here, 200 KB or less, so everyone can see it.  most soft lighting is indirect diffuse.  if the reflector is a front-surface mirror, that's indirect specular, and there's currently no way to do that in poser, but if the reflector produces a softer light than a mirror, then that's doable.