We work on a small budget at school doing pictures for the yearbook. One of the things that hasn’t made it into the budget – since we don’t do a whole lot of formal portraits – is a background stand with some backgrounds.

Instead, we make do with what we can. A plain white wall or a projection screen can make a nice clean background, but the white / off-white is a bland color. So what can we do with the lighting equipment we already have…?

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Let’s continue our touching up of this image. Now that we’ve made some global adjustments and gotten the exposure/color more or less the way we want it, we can move on to the major reason why people generally touch up photos – hiding blemishes and softening skin.

To the left, we have the image as we left it in the last phase. Does it really need to be touched up more?

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So here’s our original, unedited image. In the first part of this quick Photoshop editing series, we’re going to address some global issues – exposure, levels, color, etc. Once we have the overall feel of the picture down, we can work on more localized touch ups.

Looking at this picture, there are a couple of problems. First, it seems a touch underexposed and a tad on the low side of contrast. While there are some limited amounts of pure black in the photo (mostly the shadow between her right leg and her torso), there’s no pure white. Also, everything just seems a bit… dingy.

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Looking through my site’s stats I realized that – while I’ve written a lot about Adobe Lightroom and I’ve written increasingly about Adobe InDesign – I’ve posted almost nothing about Adobe Photoshop. While I do a lot more editing for events and such in Lightroom, there is still a place for Photoshop.

So I thought I’d take a few days to walk through an example of touching up an image that required some more advanced techniques that just wouldn’t work in Lightroom.

The image at the top is pretty much straight out of the camera from a shoot I did last summer. Ultimately, we want to end up with an image like the one on the bottom. We may not get to exactly the same point – I touched this image up a year ago, and I don’t remember everything I did – but we’ll get the gist of it.

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While the aspect ratio of a picture will tell you the specific ratio of its length to its height, there are some more general terms to describe the orientation of a picture. Most pictures will fit into one of two categories: landscape orientation and portrait orientation. Keep reading…

While the aspect ratio of a picture will tell you the specific ratio of its length to its height, there are some more general terms to describe the orientation of a picture. Most pictures will fit into one of two categories: landscape orientation and portrait orientation. Keep reading…

In the first step of this tutorial, we looked at how to remove blemishes in Lightroom. We cleaned up Mario’s face a little, removing some spots and a slight scratch/scar.  Then, we used the adjustment brush to apply some negative clarity and smooth out his skin.

At this point, he looks pretty good. This is no magazine cover, but it’s a subtly retouched photo that’s perfect for editorial uses. In this case, Mario’s eyes and teeth look fine. But, for some people, a little whitening in one or both areas will go a long way. So, just for the heck of it, let’s see what tool we have in Lightroom to help us do that…

Adjustment Brush, Again

In regular Adobe Photoshop, this would be a great place to use the dodge and burn tools. A normal step in the portrait re-touching workflow would be to dodge and burn around the eyes, whitening the whites a little bit and darkening the iris a little bit. It adds some contrast and pop to the picture.

But alas, no dodge/burn in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Those are pixel-based editing tools, and that doesn’t fit with Lightroom’s mojo. There is, however, a similar thing you can do with the adjustment brush. In the picture above, I selected the adjustment brush and zoomed in 2:! so that the eye filled most of the frame. I re-sized the brush that it was small and tried to neatly paint in the white part of Mario’s right eye. I went outside the lines a bit, and I switched to the “erase” brush to clean up the edges…

Once I had painted the area in, I ticked off the “Show Selected Mask Overlay” (that’s the reason his eye looks red in the picture to the top left) so that I could see what I was doing. Then I played with the sliders a bit to whiten his eye and remove any redness that was there.

I increased the exposure a bit first, for some subtle brightening. Then, I used the Brightness slider a bit, just for the heck of it. Finally, I desaturated a little to take out the redness. You can see the final settings I picked in the screenshot.

I’ve seen portrait re-touchers burn around the iris a bit to darken it and add contrast within the eye. You can achieve the same effect by painting a small adjustment brush around the edge of the iris and decreasing the exposure by a little bit (about a third of a stop should be nice and subtle).

Know When to Stop

The key here is to know when to stop. I was once fiddling with a picture of a football player, and I decided to whiten his eyes a little bit. I went overboard, and the extra-bright eyeball compared to his dark skin looked just a tad freaky.

Every so often, make sure you zoom out to get the full effect of your work and make sure you haven’t over-brightened something. Now that I look at it, I do think a little whitening to his eyes and teeth helped, but it’s definitely subtle. It wasn’t 100% necessary, but it looks good… and I stopped before I went too far!

That’s a good general mantra for portrait re-touching, too. At some point, just put it down. You can’t turn something craptastic into a masterpiece. More often than not, you should be able to pull a decent picture into Lightroom, take 5 or 10 minutes to touch up someone’s face, and be done with it. If that’s your goal, this simple three-part workflow should be right up your alley.

In case you jumped in at the end of the tutorial, you might want to go the first page, How to Retouch Faces and Portraits in Lightroom.

Go back: Portrait Re-touching Part 2: Softening Skim in Lightroom.

In the first step of the tutorial, we did some editing to Mario’s face and removed some blemishes and what not. It’s started to look cleaner, but his skin is still a bit rough, especially if you zoom in.

Next, we want to soften that skin out, make the pores less noticeable, and remove some of the coloration around his cheek. To do this, we’re going to make use of an awesome and versatile Lightroom tool – the Adjustment Brush.

[Note: If you want to play along, you can download the original RAW Image.]

The Adjustment Brush – What Is It?

When you click on the Adjustment Brush button (located underneath the histogram) or press the “K” button for the keyboard shortcut, you get a whole bunch of new options in your side panel.

The top set of sliders looks like a selection of the tools that are available in the regular side panel of Lightroom’s Develop module. What the adjustment brush allows you to do is apply these adjustments to very specific parts of the image. You choose the settings, use the brush to paint the adjustments on the image, and then make any fine-tuning changes you want.

The size of your brush can be increased/decreased with your mouse’s scroll wheel. There’s also a slider in the panel that you can use.

Skin’s Best Friend – Negative Clarity

Press the “K” button to put the Adjustment Brush away for a moment. When you’re back to the regular develop module, find the clarity slider and drag it to the left… to about -50 or so.

What happens? Everything gets fuzzy. Mario’s skin gets nice and soft (maybe a little too soft), but the rest of the picture has a weird hazy look to it. If only we could apply this effect only to his face.

Oh, wait. That’s what the adjustment brush is for! Reset the clarity of the picture to 0, zoom in a little bit (maybe 1:2), and pull out the adjustment brush. Set the Clarity slider to -50, resize your paint brush, and make a quick pass over Mario’s face. While you’re editing, you probably want to click the “Show Selected Mask Overlay” box at the bottom of your screen so that you can see the area you’re actually covering.

The picture above and to the left has had one brush applied with -50 clarity. Looks ok. There are still a few rough spots.

If you click “New” instead of “Edit” at the top of the panel, you can apply multiple layers of brushes. For example, you can even out that dark part at the top of Mario’s nose, or that dark spot in the middle of his cheek. This way you can target certain areas for more softening without making the whole picture a fuzzy mess.

At this point, it’s also a good idea to go back and do some more spot removals. When I zoomed out, I noticed a few more areas I could clean up that way. At this point I’m left with the image to the left.

Does Mario look like a super-model? Not really. But I think it looks better than the original. The intent here isn’t to make a drastic transformation of the subject… just to minimize some minor imperfections.

The Next Step: Whitening and Lightening

The last step in this process is to whiten and lighten some areas. Teeth and eyes, for example, can often use a little lightening to add some punch to a picture. It isn’t entirely necessary in this case, but we’re going to do it just for the heck of it.

Go back to the tutorial table of contents.

Go back: Portrait Re-touching Part 1: Removing Blemishes in Lightroom.

Go forward: Portrait Re-touching Part 3: Whitening Teeth and Brightening Eyes 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.

How to Retouch Faces and Portraits in Lightroom

I’ll update this post with links to the individual parts of the tutorial – so bookmark this page and check back in. You could also subscribe to the site’s feed to keep up to date on this tutorial and future posts.

• Portrait Re-touching Part 1: Removing Blemishes in Lightroom
• Portrait Re-touching Part 2: Softening Skim in Lightroom
• Portrait Re-touching Part 3: Whitening Teeth and Brightening Eyes in Lightroom

Photo by: Sziga.

I found this simple studio portrait in the “Portraits” tag on Flickr. It’s a good execution of a simple two-light scheme. If you click through to the photo page, there’s a description of the lights. But, you should have a decent idea based on the catch-lights in her eyes. The left eye tells it all – one light coming from off to camera left and one light off to camera right. They’re pretty even in terms of power output, because you don’t have a real contrast between the left and right sides of the face; there’s just a little shadow on the left cheek where the hair blocks some of the light.