Side Lighting Photography Techniques

Side lighting is one of the easiest ways to add depth, texture, and mood to your photos. And it’s that mood that helps create the cinematic look we often associate with the silver screen.

The great news is that this technique doesn’t require expensive studio lighting. In fact, it can be achieved completely free using natural light.

So in this article, we’re going to look at how to use side lighting in your photography and ways to enhance the effect inside Luminar Neo. Let’s get started!

What is Side Lighting?

Let’s first look at what side lighting actually is so you can be confident you’re using it correctly.

What we’re looking for is a light source positioned roughly 90 degrees to your subject, illuminating one side of them. There may be a gradual fall-off of light across the face or scene, but the side closest to the light should receive the strongest illumination.

The side that falls into shadow is what brings mood, depth, and intrigue to your image, and that’s where photographs begin to take on a cinematic feel.

Another benefit of side lighting is that your entire scene instantly gains dimension. As the light interacts with different surfaces, it reveals their shapes, textures, and contours. Compare this to front lighting, where everything becomes evenly illuminated. With side lighting, the contrast between light and shadow helps define the scene, almost as though you’re sculpting your subject rather than simply lighting it.

Using Natural Side Lighting

Although we can’t control natural light in the same way as studio lighting, we can certainly make the most of what it offers. Natural side lighting has a wide range of qualities that can dramatically influence the mood of your photographs.

Let’s start with the time of day. Golden hour, found shortly after sunrise and just before sunset, produces some of the most beautiful light available. It casts warm golden tones across the scene, making colours appear richer and more inviting while naturally complementing your subject. Because the sun sits low in the sky, it’s also perfectly positioned for creating side lighting.

Midday sun, on the other hand, is much harder to work with. As the sun sits almost directly overhead, it’s difficult to achieve true side lighting, and the harsh light can create deep shadows and high contrast that aren’t always flattering.

One way around this is to move indoors and use a window as your light source instead. The window effectively becomes your new light source, allowing you to position your subject for side lighting regardless of where the sun is outside.

Weather also plays an important role. Bright sunny conditions create stronger contrast and can produce particularly dramatic images. During golden hour, that same contrast is softened by the warm colour of the light, creating a nostalgic feel.

Cloudy days are excellent too. While direct sunlight can sometimes wash out colours, overcast skies act like one enormous softbox, producing softer, more even light that often makes colours appear richer and more saturated. This softer light is especially flattering for portrait photography because it smooths the transition between highlights and shadows while complementing skin tones beautifully.

And portraits are exactly what we’ll look at next.

Side Lighting in Portraits

Portraits benefit enormously from side lighting. You can instantly create images full of mood and intrigue, helping to produce portraits with much greater impact. Because side lighting is used so frequently in films, it’s also one of the easiest ways to achieve a cinematic look.

The benefits don’t stop there. Side lighting naturally emphasises the structure of the face, helping define cheekbones, jawlines, and facial contours. With that in mind, there are a few simple tricks you can use to get the very best results.

The first works no matter where you’re shooting, and that’s learning how to fill in shadows. If you find the contrast is becoming too strong, simply use a bounce board to reflect some of the light back onto the shadow side of your subject’s face. This doesn’t have to be expensive either. A piece of white foam board, white card, or even a nearby white wall can work perfectly. Simply move the reflective surface closer or further away until you’re happy with the amount of shadow being filled.

Indoors

One of my favourite techniques is simply asking my model to slowly turn their face towards and away from the window. Those tiny movements make a surprisingly big difference and can completely change the mood of the portrait.

The closer your subject stands to the window, the softer the light becomes. This is because the window appears larger relative to your subject, allowing the light to wrap more gently around their face. The result is a smoother transition between light and shadow and generally more flattering light for skin.

As your subject moves further into the room, the window appears relatively smaller. The light wraps around the face less, creating a more noticeable transition between the illuminated and shadowed sides. This produces a moodier look with stronger contrast.

You’ll also notice the background changes. When your subject stands closer to the window, the room behind them often appears darker by comparison, helping separate them from the background. As they move further away, the background begins to receive a more similar amount of light, making the overall scene feel more evenly balanced.

So experiment with different distances between your subject and the window, while also moving yourself around with the camera. Small adjustments in position can completely change the look of your portrait.

Outdoors

Once we move outdoors, we can make full use of the available light by positioning our subject relative to the sun. Side lighting can be achieved throughout the day, although golden hour naturally makes it much easier thanks to the lower angle of the sun.

Midday can still work, but you’ll often need to become a little more creative. Buildings, alleyways, walls, and trees can all block or redirect the sunlight, allowing you to create side lighting even when the sun is high overhead.

We’ll talk a little more about using side lighting outdoors in the next section, so let’s move on.

Side Lighting in Landscape Photography

Moving outdoors now and swapping a model for a mountain, side lighting starts to work a little differently. As we discussed earlier, the easiest time to achieve this is during golden hour, when the sun sits low on the horizon and naturally lights the landscape from one direction.

Instead of repeating how to find that light, let’s look at what it actually does to a landscape.

When light begins to strike the land from the side, every hill, valley, ridge, and rock starts casting a shadow. Those shadows instantly add depth to your image and help reveal the shape and contours of the landscape. Features that looked flat during the middle of the day suddenly become much more defined and three-dimensional.

You’ll also find it much easier to separate the foreground, midground, and background, helping to create a stronger sense of scale. Those shadows can even become compositional elements themselves, naturally guiding the viewer’s eye towards your subject.

Try to position yourself so that your main subject is illuminated while the surrounding landscape falls into shadow. The contrast between light and dark immediately attracts the eye, and when combined with framing techniques such as the Rule of Thirds or the Golden Ratio, your composition becomes much more impactful.

If you really want to understand just how much side lighting changes a landscape, visit the same location twice: once around midday and once during golden hour on a clear day. Compare the two images. Look at the depth, the way the shadows impact the terrain, the textures throughout the scene, and how much more clearly your subject stands out.

Editing Side-Lit Shots with Luminar Neo

Let’s take a look at a few tools inside Luminar Neo that can help enhance your side-lit images, no matter what genre you shoot.

Supercontrast

I’ll start with one of my favourite tools for this style of photography. Traditionally, contrast is applied globally across the entire image, but Supercontrast gives you far more control. It separates contrast into the shadows, midtones, and highlights, allowing you to fine-tune each area individually. You can increase or reduce the contrast in each tonal range until the balance looks just right.

Light Depth

This tool allows you to relight your image within a 3D space, and it’s incredibly fun to use. It’s particularly powerful for side lighting because it doesn’t simply brighten the whole image. Instead, it intelligently reads the depth of your scene and adjusts the light so it behaves naturally. For landscapes, this means hills, valleys, and other terrain receive light in a much more realistic way, helping you emphasise the depth that’s already present in your side-lit image.

Landscape Tool

Portrait photographers, don’t skip this one! Despite the name, this tool works brilliantly across multiple genres thanks to the Golden Hour adjustment. Rather than simply increasing the overall warmth of the image, it enhances the warm tones that already exist, making them richer and more noticeable. It works wonderfully on landscapes, but it’s also fantastic for skin tones, so it’s definitely worth experimenting with.

Enhance AI

This is a great tool if you’re looking for a quick way to improve your image. As the name suggests, it intelligently enhances your photo by expanding the dynamic range, adding depth, and improving the relationship between the shadows and highlights. Landscape photographers can also make use of the Sky Enhancer to create deeper, more striking skies.

Toning

If you’re aiming for a cinematic look with your side lighting, you’ll probably want a cinematic colour grade too. Luminar Neo offers plenty of colour grading tools, but if you want something quick and effective, the Toning tool is a fantastic place to start.

I often cool the shadows slightly while warming the highlights. That contrast between warm and cool tones creates a look that’s commonly used in cinema and immediately adds atmosphere to an image. Once I’m happy with the overall look, I’ll usually make a few final adjustments in the Colour tool to ensure all of the tones work together harmoniously.

The Bottom Line

So next time you’re heading out for a shoot, whether it’s portraits, landscapes, or anything in between, try using side lighting. It’s one of the easiest ways to add depth, character, and a cinematic feel to your photography, helping you create striking images that stop people in their tracks.

Enjoy!