Branding and Design

D.I.Y. Profoto Beauty Dish Diffusion Disk

April 26th, 2009

Even the best professional photo equipment can be improved with quick and easy do-it-yourself upgrades. Here’s how you can modify a Profoto beauty dish to enhance your light and save money.

The Profoto softlight reflector, or “beauty dish,” is a light shaping tool for Profoto flash heads. It produces a light quality that is broader and softer than an unmodified head, but sharper and more specular than a softbox. I used one (with a 25° honeycomb grid) on the key light for my L.A. Rock Fan portrait series.

An opaque metal disk in the center of the dish blocks direct light from the bare head and reflects it back to the dish. Without this disk, that direct light would overpower the reflected light, and the effect of the dish would be significantly diminished. This opaque disk, however, creates donut-shaped specular highlights in reflective surfaces, such as glass, metal, and eyes. Profoto offers a diffusion glass kit to address this.

This glass diffusion disk has a  6 ½” diameter and is 1/8” thick. A DIY alternative, however, can be made for significantly less money than the OEM kit. If you have the appropriate cutting tool and raw transparent white plastic, it’s as easy as tracing the circumference of the stock white metal disk onto the plastic sheet and cutting it out. If, like me, you don’t have access to such tools and material, search for plastic fabricators in your area.

Below, you can see the difference in specular highlights created with the standard metal disk (left,) and my plastic replacement (right.) Once you have your new disk ready, replacing the metal disk with it is tool-free and easy.

The Profoto glass diffusion disk comes with three support arms. To install it properly, hand tools are required to remove and replace the entire disk assembly. With the DIY disk, the standard arms work perfectly, and the disks can be swapped quickly and without tools.

First, pull in one of the three support arms with the index and middle fingers while pushing the bracing ring out and down with the thumb. Repeat this with the two remaining legs so that the ring drops to the base of the arms, releasing the tension that holds the metal disk in place.

With the bracing tension now removed, push out on one of the support arms to free the disk. Pull the disk up and out, replace it with the translucent disk, and reverse the steps to install it.