Portrait Skin Retouching in Lightroom

1. Introduction: For many years, I've been going back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop to edit the skin on my models. But I found a way to do it all in Lightroom. This saves me time and simplifies my workflow. This is not going to be a global edit affecting the whole image. We're going to change specifically on the skin. In Lightroom, we can clean up pimples and spots. Not only, we can also smooth the skin and get a very natural and even skin tone. The masks in Lightroom are great to shape light and contrast, so we can enhance the natural features of the model. So in this class, you will learn how to use light room to smooth the skin texture, adjust skin tones, and use contrast to make your model to pop even more. Let's get it started. 2. Texture: Spot removal: After you open Lightroom, go to the develop panel and look for the spot removal tool. That's our place to get started. One, because we can remove the most distracting parts of the image and also because this tool is very demanding on the computer. We should do it later, it's going to take more time to process the actions. We are in the developed panel and we have our menu here that first is the global settings of the image. You can change many things. Here we have the crop to, and here we have the removed tool. I like to use the hell mode, that's the one in the middle. The feather you can keep it around 50 or zero. I'll leave it to zero now, but you may change this depending on the results. The size, you choose according to the area that you're working with. Now, how much Zumdin we go, we'll decide the level of detail we are aiming. If you feel it's a quick fix or you can't spend much time on the edit, don't go 100% because the closer you get, the more you want to remove. I'm going 100%. Now I can adjust the size of my brush. I'll leave it around this size. And now how I do it is that I click the Control, click and drag, hit the control, click and drag. Hit the control, click and drag. So as you can see, we are removing the spots that were here. You can see here and here. I'm going to keep doing this, hitting Control and dragging. But we can do another way, too. Let's take another image to see how it is. Let's say I want to take this, but I'm not going to hit Control. I'm going just to click the button here and see what happens. It goes automatically to some area of the face to fix the point. Sometimes it works, sometimes it takes a little bit time processing. So that's why I always drag instead of just clicking, holding the Control key. But it's up to you to see how it's best for you. Oh, fast forward now, but as you can see, this image has some petty or it has a little bit more imperfections and things that I don't want. So be mindful of what parts of the person you're removing because sometimes it's something that's a feature of that person that makes her personality and who she is. And you definitely don't want to remove that. But it's up to you how much you want to do it and something that's important to do, you go all the way back and look if there is anything that's particularly glancing or hitting your eyes, and then you can go back and continue doing the edits. So I'm going to do this with another image that's a senior person, and it is a little bit dark. So I'm going to increase just a little bit exposure so I can see better what I'm doing. And again, I'm going 100% on the face and removing things that I believe that are not pleasant for the image. I mean, I don't want to make him look like he's 20-years-old. He has to look the age that he has. That's the reason that I cast him because of his looks. It's not my intention to make him look younger. I'm just trying to clean up the image. Whoever sees this can focus first on the message of the image. In this case, someone a little bit curious, looking for something. That's the first thing that people must realize when they look at this image. We have this mother and daughter here, and the kid who is a teenager is having that time of her life that has a lot of pimples and acne marks. So I'm going also to do a time lapse to show you how I clean up. I'm even going to go 200% just because I want to really remove everything. Using the tool and control and drag and see how long it takes. What we're doing here is making the texture looking smoother. We have texture, and we also have colors, which also we are going to be editing. And then we're going to use contrast and luminance to make sure that we have a great light hitting our models. Here, we have the to overlay and I left never, but you can put it as always. It's going to show every single part of the image that you ddt with this tool or Auto or selected. As you can see, there's a lot of things to be working here regarding the skin texture. It's always important to go back to the full image and see what's bothering or is calling more attention and continue from there. For me now it's pretty good. I'm going to save a snapshot here. Let's see before and after. This is now and this is how it was now and how it was. I think it's a pretty good difference on the skin texture, in my opinion, it's looking pretty natural, even though we could do more. But I think for now and for this purpose, it's pretty good. 3. Texture: Skin smoothing: To continue editing, we're going to use the masking tools, and they are pretty similar to the layers on Photoshop. So we can go here on the masking tools. As you can see, we already have some masks here that I created. Now, what we want to do is to select only the person. So we go to create mask, and we have the selections and we go to select people. Light room will detect the people that are in the frame and we have two people. We start with the tin and we go for facial skin and body skin. As you can see in green, there is the selection and we go to create mask. This is a pretty rough selection, so it needs to be a little bit better worked. As you can see here, in the eyes, there are some areas that are covering the eye and we don't want that. So we can go here in the mask that we just created and click to subtract and click on a brush. And with a brush, we're going to remove here on the eyes. And the other eye too, usually the parts that make the most mistakes are near the eyes and also near the mouth, especially on the lips. As you can see, it's going over a little bit of the lips and I definitely don't want that. I just want a selection to be on the skin of the model. We can also look for other parts of the image that it's a little bit over where we want like here. Even though it goes pretty good, it is not always 100% right. F as I see, well, we could perfect just a little bit. But because this is a very dark area, her hair is not going to be a problem with overlay just a little bit on thes areas. The most important for me usually are around the eyes and the mouth, as I said. We don't see what we're selecting because I turned off the mask. You can click here to show overlay, or you can click on the keyboard, the key O. So you can click here on the overlay to show overlay. You can choose a color for your mask. But I go with green, that's not a color that we usually see on the images. So it's easier to identify what we're selecting. Now that we have our selection, we go to the preset and choose this one that I created. It calls Skins move, and I'm going to explain later how you can save one of this. And what's doing is changing the texture to -35 and clarity to -15. And this is what's going to make the skin look a little bit smooth. I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see better. This is with the mask and the changes applied, and this is without with, without. As you can see, the skin got smoother, indeed, but we lost some of the contrast, especially the highlights, right? So we can adjust if we want the clarity probably is doing that. Now, let's say before and after, after without clarity, after. Then it's up to you how much you want to go. If you go a lot on the skin texture is going to look like this. It's not really for me this kind of skin texture doesn't look very real. It looks like a random filter applied on the image. So I'm going back to my around 35 negative. I'm going to put just a little bit of clarity. In this case, I'm going to increase a little bit the highlights because I want to get back that glow she had. So let's do before and after before, after. Wow, I can go even a little bit higher on the highlights, I guess. Again, before and after. Now, this is looking good for me. I think it's fine. Let's see how it works doing the skins move in this model. She has makeup, and the light is a studio light. Let's see if it's necessary and how far we can go. We go here in the masking tool. This doesn't have any masks before, so it's going to look like this at first. And we have here the person, we select her. We click in facial skin, body skin, and we create the mask. Now we can click O to see the mask and going to need adjustments. Here in the mask one, we can rename it to skin smooth by double clicking and add a subtract brush. As you can see, some parts of the clothes are here because color is pretty similar to the skin color. So we're going to raise all that that we don't want because, well, it's not the skin around the eyes as well. The lips again, as you can see, you got a little bit over it and a little bit here in the hair on the side, not much here. We're almost done with the selection. So I'm clicking O. We're not seeing the mask. And we're going to do different. We're not going to the preset. We're going to change ourselves. So let's get here to the texture. I'm going to go way high. To less 100 and it looks pretty smooth but doesn't look very much as a person. But then from there, we start to go back back until you find the point that you like. I'm not even looking to where I am. I'm just seeing the results of moving the slider. I like around here. Well, for coincidence, without looking, it got to 35, less 35. Now, let's see if the clarity. This is all the way clarity, doesn't look good. Here is fine. It's around ten that I left. If you want to save this, you go here to the preset and you have here the option of save current settings as a new preset and then you can name it as you want. Anytime that you want, it will be here in the list, so you can use it again. Let's see the before and after with the skins move of her. This is now, I'm going to cover the mask and that's before. After before. Honestly, looking now, I'm still thinking it's a little bit strong, to be honest, I'm not using as much anymore. The skin is move. I rather do other things on the skin and keep it the texture because it feels more lively for me when the skin has texture, and then we can change things on the color of the skin and the light. 4. Color: Skin tone: Before starting with the skin tone adjustment, we must do the global settings of the image that we want. And the reason is because the skin tone is very much related to the overall feeling of the image. We have this image here without edits that feels a little bit bluish for me, and I already did some editing, and it comes down to this result. And now that I have my overall edit done, I'm going to the masking tools again. This image, I didn't do the skins move, so we go to the person again, facial body, facial skin, and create the mask. I'm going to time lapse this part because where I did this a couple of times and you guys know how to do now using the remove brush choice. You can also add a brush and include parts that are missing. Our selection. We're going to hide the overlay. And to edit this, I also have a preset that I call skin tone, H 29 and skin tone Hu 33. But before we use the preset, I'm going to show you how you can do it starting by yourself without any presets. We go to the color panel here and we're going to desaturate the image before it goes too much, something around here. Because if you go all the way, it's completely gray and that's not really what I'm trying. It's just to take some of the intensity of the color. Could be something around here too, like less 39. The second steps to make her orange or best in the color that looks like it could be her color. We can go to saturation 100%, but we're not staying blue. We're going something here that's orange. Usually it's 29-36 depending on the temperature of the image, the person. I'm going to go like this. It feels too red for me. And if I go all the way here, it feels like yellow, it has to look like she really went for the sun bathing and really hard and maybe here. Now I decrease the saturation until a point that looks natural again. Because this is carnival, I'm going to go a little bit crazier here, a little bit higher than I used to. We're in 61%. We have this color, and this is without and worth. But there is one problem. If you go with that, if you look around her eyes and in the temples, there is a little bit of color there that makeup put. So we're not going to miss that. So I'm going to take my brush again, zoom in, remove the parts that has makeup. We can also do this with the overlay on so we can better understand what we're doing. Okay, so I think we can go a little bit up here, a little bit warm, here, too. Now I'm just checking what I'm missing with the comparison. In this area, I think you can leave a little bit more of the purple. Yeah, now it looks good for me. Let's zoom out and see again before and after. This is with the skin tone applied and without with without. What's the main difference for me here. Look at her forehead. It's not very saturated as it is on the cheeks. We can see there's a lot more oranges here, and here is more bluish side, and I like to have even skin tone for the whole face and body. So let's see again. As you can see, colors are pretty similar in hue and saturation. But now looking again, is it too much saturated? What do you think? Well, I think I'm going to reduce just a little bit saturation as well. Yeah, like this. This is the before and this is the after. We're going to edit way more this image because it has so much potential, but there are a few things that are not very good in this image. We can improve it. Okay, I'm going to do a time lapse of this one, so you can see doing both of mother and daughter. We already had to have the skin move for them. I'm going just to duplicate as before the skins move, renamed to skin tone, and now going to reset this and choose the best color for her. So I already the two steps, and let's see the difference. This is the before, the skin tone. And this is after the skin tone. Especially for the teenage, it was very good because her skin had very different tones around. As you can see, the teenage girl is really good now. Just to compare, this is where it is, and this was the first step all the way to here. 5. Light: Shaping with contrast: We have this great photo of the two girls singing, but we have a quite challenging situation. As you can see, they have different skin tones and light is hitting pretty different in them. And the one on the left side, the light hitting perfectly right in the middle of the face, creating nice shadows here. But the second model on the right side, the face is not facing the same direction, and that changes how the light's hitting her. So it's way strong on this side and this side is not that strong, right? But we don't want that, want to be more even pleasing. Already did the skin tone, so it's pretty even. I'm going to go to the hardest one, which is herb. I think because of the size of the face, I'm going to 66, and let's see what we have to do. First, we have to decrease the intensity of the light here and maybe increase a little bit of the shadows here to go a little bit up so light feels like going more even around the face. Let's start with selecting the person. In this case, I'm going to put the entire person. And this is my selection now, but I'm going to only work in this area. So I'm going to intersect with radio gradient and keep it all this area. The reason I put it first, the person and then this is so it doesn't spill the editing outside on the wall or other parts. Now we have the selection of the area that I feel it's hitting the hardest the light, and I'm going to do another thing here. I'm going to intersect with luminous range as well. I want just the parts that are clear. You can see the selection is reducing here. And here we have that other view that's the luminance map, and we're trying to get only the parts that are really, really bright. This is the selection. I'm turning off the overlay, but we still have our selection. And let's see what we can do. First, I can reduce exposure. You see? If you go too much, it goes too dark. No, maybe we can reduce highlights and it goes pretty good until a point that it breaks and it looks a little bit odd because of the selection and how much we did it. We could also use blacks. Why would I use blacks befor doing the highlights. When you push the blacks, it causes all the image, but it takes a little bit of contrast, so gives more color than using exposure and highlights. If I do this, it's very discreet. You see, I'm going to do a little bit of the blacks and a little bit of exposure to here. So let's see how it was, how it is. I think we can go a little bit in the highlights as well. And I think I'm going to adjust the selection of this to go a little bit higher. Let's see again. Before, after. Yeah. You see here is creating a little bit of area that's not good before, after. So here, before, after. Okay. But now we can do a little bit more in specific areas because it didn't work quite as expected because as you see, I use very different images. This is being lit with natural light and additional light source. And we have studio light. We have only natural light, and this variety of situations really changes how we have to edit. So sometimes it's trying to figure out the best choice. And here's good. I think the nose is still a little bit too high. Go here, decrease because you see this area doesn't have much information. So when I go down, it doesn't have any color. It turns black because it's over exposed. But we go to the limit that we can do, return to this area in a moment and correct that in a better way. So so far with these changes, in the face, and this is what we have. Let's see the before and after here. Okay, it's looking good. I feel like the whole face now feels a little bit darker. I'm going to try to increase the exposure here to create a smooth transition from dark area to bright area. Let's see how it goes. Yeah, this is good. Let's say before and after of this area before, after. So for me, it's been a little bit smoother transition from bright to dark. Let's continue doing that. We can add another one around the yes that's pretty dark too. Let's see. Yeah, like so. But I think we can go a little bit over here. That's again, before and after. Okay, it's good, but it's pretty strong. So I'm going to decrease a little and increase the shadows. Let's see what happens. Yeah, just a little of the shadows as well. Okay, so I think we can also increase a little bit exposure in this whole area of the mouth because we really want to showcase that she's singing. I want to make sure that that's a part that people see first because of contrast. Okay, now that I did these adjustments, looking the overall image, I feel like it could be a little brighter overall. So I'm going to return here to the overall changes. I'm going to increase the shadows, increase exposure around here and overall highlights here. Yeah. Now it's looking better for me, right? Let's return to the mask. And I feel like this area could be a little bit brighter because it's also heating light, and it would be nice to have more bright areas only in the side. So I'm going to increase a little bit of a little bit no, quite amount of shadows. Maybe I can use the exposure will be better, something like this. I'm going to create another radio filter for the whole area here using the parts that were pretty bright. The middle that IRR did something, remember? And I'm selecting both areas here, and I'm going to intersect with aluminum filter. But I'm going to remove the brightest of the brightest areas, something like this. If you see closely, it has this texture. I'm going to try to remove that a little bit, so we can look even better for the transition of the colors and go even a little bit higher, select. Now I'm going to increase exposure, but not too much. Here is too much. Something around here. Another thing that's bothering me a little is this line that I don't know where it's coming from, if it's a shadow or something on the skin, a texture. But I'm going to try to reduce this as well. So I have to create a radio filter here to select the area that I want to work with. And now I'm going to intersect again with luminous range and remove whatever is too bright. Something around here. Okay, that's the selection we have. Turn off. Let's see if the shadows can get something, not much. So we go to the exposure. Yeah. Now that I reduce it this area before, after, I feel like this area is a little bit too dark and this area is a little bit too dark. So let's continue working this part. Let's see if just suppose a little bit more, I can get that just a little. A little bit under the eyes as well. I'll just increase the shadows, pin up the shadows. Good, but I feel like could be a little bit more to the left and closer exposure. Yeah, very little, little. And also, in this area, we have a highlight here, and here is bringing a little bit darker. I'm going to try to reduce the difference as well, intersect with luminous range. Yeah, something around here, increase shadows. Okay, there needs to be a little bit bigger, like so around here. Yeah. Just to make sure that we have, like balanced exposure here and here. I'm going to reduce a little bit more the exposure here and create another radio filter in this area because I don't want just this area to be really bright. So I'm reducing a little bit the contrast, you see, by the highlights. So it's not as highlighted as before. And now I'm applying a filter to the whole area. And now my intention is to bring a little bit of the light, but not what's too bright. So I'm also creating an intersection with light, luminance. So it's not selecting this area, and I'm going to increase just a little bit for the shadows. There. Let's see in a far distance before, after. I think it's getting better. Let's see in her face we can do anything. For me, her expression and face, the light is heating very, very well, but I'm going to just correct some parts that might be a little bit over like here. It's like the brightest part of her face. Maybe that's not needed to be the brightest part. I'm going to reduce just a little to be more even, and maybe the forehead could be a little bit more light. So we have good light here, good light here, nose, and the forehead. But as you can see, there is a little bit of bright here, and here is not that bright. I'm also going to intersect, so I don't mess with the parts that I think that are already bright enough. So I'm removing all the brightest part. You see? That was the brightest part. Yeah, something around this. So I want this part in the middle to be as bright as the rest to be more even light. Let's see if it works. Yeah. Let's see before and after, before, after. This is what we can do to this image. Honestly, with herb taking more time could be beneficial to have better lighting, correcting all the detail, they are bothering a little, going step by step. But I think we went pretty far. Let me save a snapshot here and compare. This is how it was before, and this is how it's now. I think it was a pretty good change. For this image, I'm going to time lapse, all the editing I'm going to do and comment some things along the way. So this image is back lit, and the chin and this area of the face is more illuminated than the forehead. So I'm going to work on that. First, I'm going to create a radio filter around. I just bring a little bit more light overall. Also, I feel like the neck is not lit enough and I love when you have, good curvature in the neck and the areas. So something like this. The whole point here is to make the person pop and the features that we think that's important for the person to be more evident. In this case, is the big smile and the eyes that I'm aiming for and also shaping the face in a way that looks better. Because it's very important to consider all the types of images that we're editing. There are so many conditions, and I try my best to bring images that are very different from each other, different skin tones, different ages, to make sure that we have a range of situations and think about the best way to deal with each of the situations. Now, there's a point that the face is going to be really even the light now, and that's where we're going to start working. Okay, so this is the edit that I did for the lighting in her face. Let's see what we done. Let me save this and compare. This is after editing with the light, and this is how it was before. Okay, so we see that there's more light in the chin and around the mouth and not much on the forehead and the sides. And then we did this looking more even the light on the forehead and the face. Looking again, what I could do it add a little bit of more dark area here just to make sure that the face really feels like s popping. Go a little bit darker here. Well, but I think I'm taking some dark areas that already pretty dark. So I'm going to intersect with luminous range and remove some of the most dark areas, so it doesn't go too dark. Something around here. Okay. Turn off. Let's again. Yeah, more even shadow, it doesn't go too dark here and it's not as bright as was before. I'm going to update my snapshot so we can compare again. This was before and now, I could do a little bit more shaping some parts, maybe around the nose, giving more volume, but I think it's pretty good this way. 6. Extra: Lips and teeth: We already did some major changes in our photos, but there are a few final touches we can do too. First, we can change the colors of the libs using the automatic selection from Lightroom. We go to the masking tool, create new mask, select people, and then we select the person we want and we have the lips and create mask. Now, this is the selection. Sometimes it's not perfect as it is with the skin and you may need to correct something. In this case, there are some parts that are off the lip, so I'm going to take a brush and remove the parts by subtracting. This is our selection. For this image, particularly, I don't think that the color red here is really matching with the colors of the eyes and the overall image. So I'm going to try it out a few colors for the lips and see what happens. Okay? So we have our selection here. I'm going to blacks first, I'm going to decrease blacks because I feel like too bright, but the color is still not where I want. I don't think the colors are matching, you know? I'm going to hooey here and just move around. Well, this is not good. Actually, I see that selection is not perfect, too. Let's add something into the selection. These parts also need the color because for the lips, if we're going to make a big change on the colors, then selection has to be really good. Otherwise, will be noticeable the parts that are not selected and will have a very different color. Back to our selection. We went to the shift colors here. You'll see definitely something around here looks better because matches with the color of the makeup on the ice, but it's too saturated now. So I'm going to decrease saturation, something around here. Well, it didn't look good. So I'm going to go back to the Huey and try another thing. I'm going to reduce the saturation and do as I do with the skin and use this part to find the color. It's something here. So I'm going to adjust saturation. So this is the lips now, and this is how it was now and how it was. I feel like now it's matching better the colors from the lips and the eyes, and I'm going to leave it as this. There's another thing that we can do on the face to look better. We can make sure that the teeth have a more white color than yellowish. So let's go to this image, and we can see the Teeth looks a little bit yellowish, even because of the white balance is pretty much to the yellow side, so it's bringing that. But I don't want to change the white balance. I want just to change the colors of the teeth. So we go back to the masking tool, create new mask, select people, select her, and the teeth, create the mask. Again, it's a rough mask. It's always good to check if it's everything looking good. It's taking something outside the teeth again, remove with a brush. It doesn't turn white, things that I don't want to be white. Okay, I think selection is good enough. I already have a custom selection here that calls white teeth. Basically, it's increasing exposure a little bit and decreasing saturation a little bit as well. This is with the masking tool on the teeth and this without. Can see it's subto. We don't go very crazy on this. Otherwise, it will look weird to have really, really white teeth. Now, let's do with the second model, we go to select people, the model on the right, her teeth, and create mask. Now we have her mask here. Let me just see if it's good enough. It's pretty good, I guess. It's just taking some of the tongue there that not supposed to here, and we're good. Now again, I just go to my preset, white teeth and haran is done. 7. Recap: Now to recap all we did. First, we started with this image, and then we did some heel on the skin, changing, especially the details on the skin, as you can see, removing all the marks on the skin, things that we didn't want on the image. And then we went to the global edit, where I changed a few things overall because I wanted to add the skin tone next and we got to this point. And after this, we did some shaping of the light on the face. And finally, for this image, I also changed the colors of the lips, and we got this. So that was our starting point, and that was our final image. I think it was pretty good. 8. Final words: We went a long way using only light room. There are so many creative tools and ways to edit an image that so will have classes talking about it. Now, show us your before and after, and let's help each other with useful insight. And let me ask you this. Did you find this knowledge useful for you? Please leave a review and let people know.