- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Retouching Portraits
While Photoshop is still king when it comes to pro-level portrait retouching (and just removing distracting things, in general), it’s amazing how many portrait retouching tasks we can now do right here in Lightroom (thanks, in big part, to the AI-masking features) without having to jump over to Photoshop. Here are a few of the key things you might do to a portrait, and it’s a great way to see how these tools work together.
Step One:
Here are the things we’re going to retouch in this image: (1) remove any minor blemishes, as well as reduce the darkening and minor wrinkles under her eyes; (2) brighten and enhance her eyes; (3) soften her skin (well, smooth the tone gradations in her skin); and (4) lighten the dark circles under her eyes (caused by where I positioned the flash). Although we’re seeing the full image here, for retouching, it’s often best to zoom in quite a bit, so you can really see what you’re doing as you’re working. Press Command-+ (PC: Ctrl-+) a few times to zoom in tight (as seen in the next step).
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Step Two:
There are some minor blemishes on her forehead and cheek, which we’re going to remove first, so click on the Remove tool (the eraser, in the toolbox right below the histogram) or just press the Q key. There are three different modes to this tool and for removing simple blemishes like this we use Heal mode, so click on the center icon at the top of the Remove panel. This tool works with just a single click, and I recommend making your brush Size a little bit larger than the blemishes you’re going to remove (you can use the Size slider in that same panel). Just move your cursor over a blemish, and then click once to remove it. Once you do that, two stamps (circles) with a line connecting them appear. The lighter stamp appears where you clicked (where the blemish was), and the thicker stamp shows where on her face Lightroom choose to “sample” some clean skin texture to make the fix.
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Step Three:
Continue this process of moving your cursor over a blemish and just clicking once to remove it. Each time you do this, it leaves behind a little Edit Pin that looks like a Band-Aid (as seen here). If needed, you can click directly on a little Band-Aid to edit it (click-and-drag the thicker stamp to a different spot to sample from—pick a spot nearby, so the skin tone matches) or delete it (click on it, then hit the Delete [PC: Backspace] key). While we’re here, let’s go ahead and fix that cross hair (a single hair going the wrong direction, which stands out) in her hair on the left side (you can see it in Step Two). Make your brush Size a little larger than the cross hair, and just paint right down along that hair, and it’s gone.
TIP: What to Do If It Looks Bad
Sometimes Lightroom simply picks a bad spot to sample from. If that happens, click the Refresh button in the Selected section of the Remove panel to have it pick a different spot to sample from (or just press the Forward Slash key (/) on your keyboard). Each time you press it, it chooses a different area, which is really helpful.
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Step Four:
Let’s zoom back out (press Command-– [PC: Ctrl-–] once or twice) to see how our blemish removal looks. It looks pretty good, but it’s only a start. Next, let’s reduce the darkening and minor wrinkles under her eyes.
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Step Five:
Zoom back in, but this time just zoom in on one of her eyes (as seen here). With the Remove tool still active and set to Heal mode, make the brush Size a little larger than the wrinkle area we want to reduce (see tip below), then paint a stroke over the wrinkles under her eye on the right. In the area you paint, an stamp (outline) appears in the shape of your brush stroke (as seen here), much like the one you saw when we fixed the cross hair earlier. This stamp works as a visual cue, so you can see what you’re painting over.
TIP: Quickly Change Brush Size
Just use the Left and Right Bracket keys on your keyboard (they’re to the right of the letter P on a standard US keyboard) to change your brush size: press the Left Bracket key ([) to make it smaller or the Right Bracket key (]) to make it larger.
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Step Six:
Okay, just so you know, it doesn’t always work this poorly, but it chose kind of a crazy place to sample from here (her hair). Your first line of defense when this happens is to click the Refresh button once (or twice) to see if it does a better job. That’s what I did here, and while it did pick better spots than from inside her hair, it didn’t pick any really good spots either. That means we’re going to have to do this manually and click-and-drag the second stamp (the one attached by the line with an arrow) to an area closer to where we want to retouch.
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TIP: How to Move Around When You’re Zoomed In Tight
When you’re zoomed in tight like this it’s easy to move around your image by just pressing-and-holding the Spacebar on your keyboard. Your cursor will change into a grabber hand and now you can just click-and-drag your image around.
Step Seven:
Click inside that second brush stamp and drag it out of her hair (or wherever it ended up) and below her eye. As you can see, this a much better area to sample from. Now, you might be wondering, “Why didn’t Lightroom choose this spot in the first place, or at least somewhere near it?” You know, that’s a great question, but I have no earthly idea [insert cricket sound effect here]. But, at least we can fix it manually. Also, there is a Feather slider in the Selected section of the Remove panel and once you’ve picked a better area, you might try increasing the feather to see if it helps the retouch blend in better (I increased it to 38, here). Now, do the same thing you did here to the wrinkles beneath her other eye.
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Step Eight:
Let’s zoom back out a bit for this next step. Her eye areas are a bit dark because I positioned the light almost right above her head, so we’ll have to brighten up those areas. We’re going to use AI masking to make this really easy, so click on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram) to bring up the masking tools. After a few seconds, the AI will detect a person in your image and a circular thumbnail of your subject’s face will appear at the bottom of the panel. Hover your cursor over that thumbnail and a red tint appears over the entire person, but if you click on it, a list of areas you can mask individually appears. Turn on the Eye Sclera checkbox, so we can work on brightening just the whites of her eyes first (they’ll appear in a creepy red tint), and then click the Create Mask button at the bottom right of the panel. Now that the whites of her eyes are masked, let’s increase the exposure, but be careful—this is the thing that most people who mess up a retouch wind up overdoing (brightening the whites too much). I raised the Exposure slider to 1.29 because her whites were really dark.
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Step Nine:
Next, we want to brighten her irises and pupils separately, so we need to create a new mask (we want to adjust each area separately). So, click on Create New Mask at the top of the Masks panel, but the circular thumbnail of her face doesn’t appear just yet—you have to choose Select People first from the panel that appears (it’s different after the first time you use these people masks), and then you’ll see the thumbnail. Click on it, then turn on the Iris and Pupil checkbox, and then click the Create Mask button. Now, let’s increase the exposure and shadows to bring out the brightness and detail in her irises and pupils. I took the Exposure slider to 0.68, and the Shadows slider to 69. That’s way better (see the After image here), but there’s something missing: the white catchlight in the eye on the right side of the image.
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Step 10:
What we’re going to do is copy the catchlight from the eye on the left over onto the eye on the right—and we don’t even have to jump over to Photoshop to do it. In the toolbox, click on the Remove tool again, but this time, in the Mode section, choose Clone mode (as shown here; its icon looks like a rubber stamp). Now, move your cursor over the eye on the right (the one without the catchlight), resize your brush, then position it where you wish the catchlight was and click once. Most likely nothing great will happen, but we’re not done. Click on the stamp on the other end of the line it’s connected to, and drag it over the catchlight in the left eye, and it clones that catchlight over to the right eye (crazy, I know, but somehow it works). Okay, we’re almost done.
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Step 11:
Next, let’s work on smoothing the tone gradations in her skin. Go back to the Masks panel and click on Create New Mask again, choose Select People, and then click on the circular thumbnail. This time, turn on the Facial Skin and Body Skin checkboxes, and then click the Create Mask button (it can look weird if you adjust the facial skin but leave the rest alone, so we’ll do them both). Of course, when you turn on these checkboxes you get the sunburned look you see here, but you know it just means her skin is masked (but not her detail areas like her eyebrows, eyes, and lips).
TIP: Keep from Seeing Too Many Pins
To see just the currently selected Edit Pin, choose Selected from the Show Edit Pins pop-up menu in the toolbar beneath the Preview area.
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Step 12:
To smooth the tone gradations in her skin, go down to the Effects panel, and drag both the Clarity slider and the Texture slider to the left (I dragged them to –46 and –23, here). Each of these sliders helps soften those transitions when you drag them to the left. Our final step is easy: we’re going to brighten the dark areas under her eyes (where we reduced the wrinkles earlier). Click on Create New Mask once again, but this time choose Brush from the panel. Increase the exposure (midtone brightness) amount by dragging the Exposure slider to the right (I raised it to 0.49, here), then paint over those darker areas under her eyes, and we’re done. Here’s a before/after of our retouch.
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