How to get beautiful even and soft lighting on face?

Question

How do I get bright even and soft light on a face like this?

Image taken from this link

I got the exact same equipment but I wasn't able to reproduce the result.

First I tried lighting it from the side and I got this:

As you can see, it is not even at all. There are a lot of hotspots. Even on the right side where the hotspot is less apparent it is not even.

Then I thought maybe I should avoid side lighting, just like in the original video, I did a traditional clam shell style with a reflector at the bottom. I got this:

It seems to be a bit better, but it still doesn't have that even look.

Any ideas, what I am missing?

About my my setup:

Camera is in manual mode f/9, 1/250, ISO500

That setting avoided most of the ambient light.

The softbox is the exact one in that link. 26″ Rapid Box Octa. It has a deflector plate inside, and a diffuser fabric at the front.

Answer 1

Editing out the eyes removes a metric tonne of information that might have been helpful in answering your question — please don't do that if you're asking about studio lighting problems — but there is still something to be seen in the photos you have posted.

Apart from the makeup and post-processing that have already been mentioned in the comments, it's pretty obvious that although you may have been using the same equipment, you weren't using it in the same way. The lighting in the video is Paramount ("butterfly"/clamshell) lighting, yes (and the idea that you could come close to reproducing it with side light is quite a jump). But please note where the light and reflector are in the video. Softboxes aren't soft light if you don't have them close enough to your subject, and the shadow edges in your photographs are telling me that you had your Octa just a little bit further away than the 90cm-ish distance (probably even closer than that) that Mr. Beckta was using. The boom isn't an extravagance, it's what's keeping the light stand out of the picture, since the light needed to be considerably closer to the subject than the camera. It's not the absolute size of the light that matters; it's the size of the light from the subject's point of view. (For the same reason, the reflector should be dangerously close to being in-frame.)

Almost every photographer who has picked up a softbox has made the same mistake early on. While it's true that (indoors at least) it's almost impossible to make light from a softbox quite as hard as it would have been from a bare speedlight, it's not until you bring it in very close (no more than twice the diagonal/diameter away) that it becomes truly soft; any further than that, and you're transitioning into "dramatic" territory as the apparent size of the light gets smaller. (What about absolute size? That has more to do with fall-off and coverage than softness most of the time; you can light a larger area from farther away with the same softness but more gradual fall-off using a bigger box.)