Retouching a Portrait in Lightroom

Name: Retouching a Portrait in Lightroom
Author: Jeff Shaffer

In these lessons, you will learn how to make adjustments to a portrait by adjusting individual sections of the image. You will make changes to skin, hair, and…

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Course: On-Demand

Hello! In today's lesson, I will explain using a real-world example, an approach to processing a standard studio portrait to enhance skin color, tone, and texture in your subject. Here, you could see the original capture and the final result side by side, with the final image incorporating two textures added in Photoshop. Let's begin by adjusting the color and tone of the original image. I chose the edit panel, as usual, to add a profile and perform light and color adjustments. I'll choose Adobe neutral to begin since that reveals a bit more shadow detail and lowers contrast overall slight. Using the exposure slider in the light panel, I'll darken the image just a bit overall. The skin highlights in his shirt could use more detail and texture. Moving the highlight slider to the left helps this considerably. I'll close up the light panel now and twirl down color. Next, I'll warm up the image with the temp slider, moving it to the right. The skin color is more appealing with a warmer balance overall. Adding a slight amount of magenta tint helps as well. Now I'll zoom in to look at his skin tone and texture in greater detail. I could see a number of areas I'd like to retouch and color correct, and a few spots that need to be smoothed out or lightened as well as color adjusted. Starting with his forehead, I could see some darker areas. I want to light that will help smooth out his skin. For this task, I'll choose the adjustment brush. I want a highly-feathered brush to make it blend better. I'll twirl this down to see my feather settings. I'll adjust the brush size with the bracket keys. The left bracket makes the brush smaller and I'll brush over the area that I would like to modify with just a little bit of exposure increase applied. And then I could dial it up from there. That's too much. I could bring it back down so I could see the effect here. Now seeing over it, you could see the mask where I painted on. So, I can paint a little bit more in this area here, kind of even that out like so. That's a little smoother. See if that's covering the whole area. It looks like it is. Maybe even a little bit in here. Okay. So I dialed in about a stop worth of exposure on that area. I'm gonna add another brush to lighten this area right above his eyebrow. So I will go click this button and we'll add this other brush. I'll paint it in there with what I currently have and we'll see if we need to go further with that. Now it's over that to see where my overlay is. There's some in there. And it already looks better but I could try increasing it a little bit more see how that looks. I may need to shift that color temperature then that area a little bit because it's a bit cooler in there. Bring that up just to touch. Next, I'll zoom out to see what I've done so far. For that, I'll use the command minus keys: command or control minus on the PC. And if I move my mouse over here, I could see what I've got. Now, I think I went a little bit too far on that some of that right there, so, I could click on this brush here and actually reduce some of that brightening with the slider here. Let's see how this one is. That one is looking pretty good. Right about there is not looking too bad. Okay. So zooming out helps you see how the whole image is coming together. And that's why I do this frequently. I would come in close. You need to zoom out to see your result. In this lesson, you have learned how to make a number of initial edits to a portrait, adjusting color balance and skin tone. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson where we will continue retouching and adjusting the image. Let's go check it out.

Advanced Provider : Jeff Shaffer 6 Lessons · 35m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

In these lessons, you will learn how to make adjustments to a portrait by adjusting individual sections of the image. You will make changes to skin, hair, and the lighting and background of the image, and even how to make adjustments in Photoshop.

What You'll Learn

Assess a portrait image to make better image processing decisions
Adjust skin color, tone, and texture in Lightroom
Retouch portraits using the Spot Healing Tool, and retouch and crop the image
Apply Profiles, Temp, and Adjustment Brushes to a portrait
Use the Edit in Photoshop command to retouch hair and skin
Composite a textured background by adding texture layers in Photoshop

Key Takeaways

The course teaches making adjustments to a portrait by working on individual sections of the image.
You make changes to the skin, hair, lighting, and background of a portrait, and also make adjustments in Photoshop.
Profiles, Temp, and Adjustment Brushes are used to assess and process a portrait image.
The Edit in Photoshop command is used to retouch a portrait and composite a textured background.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to make adjustments to a portrait by adjusting individual sections of the image, including changes to skin, hair, and the lighting and background, as well as how to make adjustments in Photoshop.

Which tools and techniques does this course cover?

It covers Profiles, Temp, and Adjustment Brushes on a portrait, the Spot Healing Tool, retouching and cropping, and the Edit in Photoshop command for retouching hair and skin and adding texture layers.

What skills will I gain?

You will gain skills in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, image editing, photo editing, photo manipulation, photo retouching, and photographic processing.

Does this course use Photoshop in addition to Lightroom?

Yes. The course shows how to use the Edit in Photoshop command to retouch a portrait and composite a textured background, including adding texture layers.