How to Retouch Faces and Portraits in Lightroom

While people often think of Lightroom’s editing capabilities in terms of global adjustments (exposure, contrast, saturation, etc), it can also be used to re-touch portraits. Over the course of this week, we’re going to look at how we can use a few tools in Lightroom to quickly re-touch someone’s face and improve the quality of the image.

We’re going to start with this picture of Mario (shown to the left). He’s at an in-house press conference, signing his letter of intent to attend Wagner College to play basketball next year.

While not a portrait, per se, it’s a nice editorial shot that focuses closely enough on his face. This highlights some features that could be cleaned up to make for a more flattering picture.

The final image we’re working towards will look something like this. In this picture, I had two main goals – removing blemishes and softening his skin. We’ll also look at a third technique, similar to dodging/burning, that you can use to whiten teeth and lighten eyes.

If you’d like to play along, you can download the original RAW file and work with that. Or, you could just work with one of your own images.

I’m going to post the tutorial in three parts throughout this week. First, we’ll remove some blemishes and do some basic clean-up work. Then, we’ll look at how to soften Mario’s skin a little bit. Finally, I’ll play around with some tools to whiten his teeth and lighten his eyes… even though it’s not really necessary in this picture.

Is Lightroom the Best Choice?

Before we dive into this process, we should think for a minute about the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Is this our best choice for re-touching portraits?

If you’re goal is to produce a high fashion, glamour portrait that will grace the cover of a big name magazine… no. There are certainly some tools in Photoshop that you will miss in Lightroom. You’re not going to spend an hour or two re-touching one photo in Lightroom; there just isn’t that much to be done.

Nor is this going to allow you to remove large tattoos, “photoshop out” people, and things like that. Over the summer, I did a photoshoot and I had to remove a large tattoo that covered the bulk of the model’s lower leg. It was a pain, and the results weren’t perfect (it’s the top right picture from Olinda’s photoshoot at Branch Brook), but it was definitely something I needed Photoshop to even attempt.

For your every day portrait retouching, though, Lightroom is perfect. In a few minutes, you can make all the adjustments you need to improve your image. You can remove small blemishes, soften skin, eliminate small scars, whiten teeth. Plus, you can do all this in a non-destructive way that layers edits in a database and doesn’t require you to store 100+mb master files.

If you need to do some intense editing on one image, go to Photoshop. If you want to tidy up some portraits quickly and efficiently, stick with Lightroom.