5 Tips to EDIT Portraits in LIGHTROOM (Like a PRO!)

hey guys and welcome back to a brand new video today we're going to be diving into Lightroom and I'm going to be running you through my top five portrait editing tips for anyone out there shooting portraits and editing them so you can edit them like a pro so without further Ado let's dive into Lightroom and let's get this video started all right so here we are inside a Lightroom and this is the photo that we're going to be working with this is of my good friend Olga shot in turkey and uh in my opinion this door absolutely makes this photo but the first tip that we're going to run through is making sure you're nailing and correcting your exposure one of the things you want to make sure you're always going to be doing and this is going to be a recurring theme in this video is making sure you're accurately depicting your model in your shot you want to make sure they look like they do in real life and this is going to be irrelevant of the camera settings used the lenses use the light you were shooting in you want to make sure they look real so first things first exposure so here I would say more or less this photo is actually pretty well exposed but if we zoom in here on orca's face you can see there's a a little bit of light here it's not clipping whatsoever for example if I boost it up the highlights here we would definitely would be wanting to bring down these highlights ever so slightly but that's what we're going to be doing anyway we don't want to be killing off all the life and light in this image but we do want to be just a little bit decreasing the highlights ever so slightly now something I do in my shots as well is make sure that there is plenty of contrast so I'm just going to increase the contrast a little bit this wasn't shot at Golden hour this was shot just after gold now but luckily we're not dealing with any harsh Shadows here and then of course when we're talking about exposure we can't go past the tone curve so something I'm going to do here is just drop the Shadows just a little bit nothing too crazy and then I'm going to increase the mid tones to make sure we're still giving a whole lot of life into the image through you know the light and making sure there's dark and bright parts of the image but then I'm also going to because I don't want this to be super dark I don't want you know this area to be super dark and I also don't want the door to be super dark I'm just going to raise the blacks ever so slightly now this is going to give a little bit of a fade over the entire image but it's a nice little trick to add to your portrait shots because it does give them a more cinematic filmic look sure it doesn't look like film but it's a little bit more you know it's a little less digital let's call it that all right so now we've corrected the exposure or at least we have in my opinion let's have a look at the before and the after let's move on to correcting the skin tone now once again we're pretty lucky here Ultra skin is pretty much accurate to what it looks like in real life we shot with the right white balance and we're good to go but let's say you didn't shoot with the right white right the white right the right white balance my goodness that's harder to say than it sounds that's how you didn't shoot with the correct white balance what you can do here is you can dive into the basic panel here and you can simply either click on auto now this is going to give you a fairly accurate representation of what you should be working with now this has made the image a lot cooler than what it was so in my opinion we might just warm it up a little bit and we're pretty much good to go from there but I think our white balance is more or less on point and you can also pick up this little dropper here and then just click on something that is supposed to be Pure White sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't Auto features aren't always that great and when they work they're amazing when they don't they suck but anyway what we want to be doing there is first of all starting with the white balance and then we can move down into the hsl tab now this is somewhere that you can really go right or really go wrong with the main three colors are going to be correcting the skin tone are the red or affecting the skin tone because you might not be correcting it are the Reds the oranges and the yellows of course all depending on what your skin tone is and of course depending on what light you shot in so let's say for example let's take the Reds if we just kill off all the Reds we can instantly see alka's lips and a few little aspects of her face go gray far from ideal so let's reset that and of course Orange that's not even a human and then in this instance yellow let's kill all those off we're really not working with many yellows in the skin tone here at all we actually might be working with a few more yellows in the door if anything and that's actually a really nice look let's kill off those yellows to make those whites in the door stand out a little bit more and be a little bit more white a little bit more contrast everyone loves it so in my opinion here Oka skin tone is more or less dialed in if anything if absolutely anything we might increase the luminance of the orange just a little bit to make a popper just a little bit more and maybe decrease the saturation of the orange a little bit maybe a little bit on the red saturation just ever so slightly and I'm pretty sure we're good to go now you might be thinking yourself Zach we've hardly made an impact on this image whatsoever but that's actually a good thing if you can take a photo that looks really accurate and when you put it into Lightroom you don't have to make that many changes that means you uh took a pretty good photo in person so this is an ideal kind of shot to edit because it's showing you that if you nail it in camera believe me your your post processing workflow is going to be so much easier but this is more or less the basics of correcting the skin tone of course we could dive into the masking tab here but that is going to be held for a little bit of a later tip a little bit of a later tool so don't worry about that just yet let's move on okay so next up is making sure the skin is flattering let's be honest some days the skin just isn't that good and if you've got to go out to shoot or maybe you've got a client deadline you don't really have a choice you've got to get in front of the camera or at least you've got to get someone else in front of the camera and maybe they're not having the best skin day either in our situation here luckily Olga doesn't have any bad skin days going on whatsoever so we're in luck but it doesn't always mean that a little bit of skin flattering couldn't go astray because to be honest with you the lenses and the cameras these days take such sharp photos that it's going to pick up everything and sometimes it can go over the fact and just make things look Ultra sharp in my opinion I don't like this look whatsoever so what we're going to do is we're simply just going to come into the basic tab here into the presence little sub Tab and then just drop the clarity and texture ever so slightly and you don't want to go overboard with this so if we have a look in here if we're just dropping the clarity just a little bit it just gives it like a little bit of a subtle glow to the face which is beautiful but if we drop the clarity like crazy this looks like it was shot on a Samsung Galaxy S3 in like 2011. so far from ideal but either way we're gonna undo that real quick either way this is something I do to all of my shots regardless if it is a landscape photo or if it's a portrait photo I love the subtle glow that it gives and this is just super flattering on top of if you have skin in your photo this is just going to make it look that little bit nicer so yes always ideal you can of course go into the masking tab with this as well and then make fine little adjustments so if you don't want to be dropping the clarity like crazy on all the image just simply add a brush to your shop instead of me telling you why not I just show you we could come in here hit brush and then just make this a little bit smaller let's say we wanted to just make this a little bit smoother we could come in here and then just drop the clarity ever so slightly and then also just drop the texture and then more or less that is sorted and you'd never know from the before and after and by looking at this maybe if it's a really up close shot it'll be a different story but at the moment this is looking great all right now let's move on to masking this is a really really powerful one especially if you're dealing with some inconsistencies in the skin this can honestly save a shot so let's dive into the masking tab here and before we add any of our own masks Let's uh let's hit select people and what that's going to do is Lightroom is going to have a look at the photo use Ai and then they're going to show you exactly what person shows up and then the crazy part is you can go in and you can select different parts of the person or you can select multiple parts of the person to make a mask and it's going to save you a whole lot of time so for example let's say right here we want a body skin facial skin we wanted lips but not teeth that hasn't really nailed the lips side of thing oh wait hold on yes it has of course it has uh it were a little oh my good goodness we're zoomed in we're a little bit off here but we can fix that up with a a brush there and more or less that is all the skin all oh I don't want to hit that more or less that is all the skin done we can create that mask if we come back into people again we could then select maybe all the clothes boom create mask again and now we have masks of pretty much everything in the shot apart from the hair Let's go people again let's have we got the hair here we do my goodness this is overpowered and boom we've just saved ourselves about five to ten minutes of brushing and a little bit of annoyance with the auto mask tool and there we go we've just saved all that time so this is something that I like to do with all my shots I want to make sure that I'm getting the absolute most out of my raw image and with masks you can do that so alright so first things first you might be thinking yourself Zach this is really hard to see because it's green and that is just because my mask overlay is green but you can turn your mask overlay off by pressing o and then o to turn it back on so this makes things a lot nicer something that I like to do to the hair a lot is to add contrast so what we're going to do here is just increase the highlights ever so slightly and we're going to increase the contrast as well we don't want to go too harsh it's kind of seeing this as a bit of a dark spot and we're just going to drop the Shadows a little bit maybe decrease the blacks and then what we can do is we can just hit this I turn it off and on it's super super subtle hardly noticeable but it just kind of gives a little bit more depth to the hair and a little bit more contrast and like I said in the beginning of this video I like contrast so I'm happy with that now with the clothes I would arguably arguably say the clothes are more or less dialed in if anything maybe just the highlights down a little bit on the top but that's nothing serious and then the skin let's uh because we didn't use a mask for the whole skin last time to drop a little bit of clarity and drop a little bit of the texture I think that's looking good and then maybe just add a slight amount of warmth into the skin tone nothing too crazy sometimes it's also good to add a little purple but nothing too crazy also as you can see we're literally adding two and one into our shot this is hardly making a difference but just adding that little bit of a touch and this is more or less my masking workflow I've of course sometimes it can be much longer and much more detailed than this but for this photo we're in luck which is beautiful so one last mask that I do to pretty much all of my shots is I add a beautiful beautiful vignette to my shots which is just dropping the exposure to make Olga stand out a little bit more from the shot and this works perfectly in portrait photos because of course if you're taking a portrait photo you want your subject to be the main focus of the shot not the background and even though this background is really cool and it's definitely I can't I yeah definitely eye-catching we still want Olga to be the center of attention so things are looking good here is our before here is out after and then last but not least we want to make sure we are dialing in the eyes so the eyes are the first things we look at when we see a photo of someone and to be honest with you they're one of the things that people either do really well or do horribly wrong so what we're going to do is we're going to add a brush mask or a brush mask and we're going to come in here we're going to decrease our feather down to 50 oh that's 51 that's going to annoy me 50. there we go and we've got Auto mask turned on and then we're just going to come in here make it super small I kind of like to outline and then color in the middle there we go and you can of course do this with both eyes if you're if you can see both eyes and then what a lot of people do is they come down to Clarity boom done dialed we're good to go now to be honest with you that actually doesn't look too bad for this shot even though we are going to dial it down just a little bit but if you're looking directly into the camera and someone just boosts the clarity of your eyes like crazy it does stand out like a sore thumb Which is far from ideal but some things I like to do with the eyes is make sure the white part is completely white so what I do here is especially with brown eyes you don't have to worry about desaturating blues or greens so I simply just come in here I desaturate just a little bit and then I also add a little bit of blue into the eyes and that just kind of makes sure everything looks nice and white in there and we've got before and after we can see the eyes aren't too bright and nothing too crazy as is going on but there is a lot of contrast in there and it does definitely grab your attention and guys there we go they are my five portrait editing tips for Lightroom of course this is going to be Case by case scenario sometimes you're going to have to use more masking sometimes you're going to have to do a whole lot more skin tone correction but this is how to do it these are the main ways that I navigate portrait editing inside a Lightroom and I've been doing this for the last five years so hopefully I've been able to teach you a thing or two but with that said guys that is going to wrap up today's video I hope you've enjoyed and I'll catch you in the next one peace

Channel: Zac Watson

Views: 30,384

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Id: 24BVUP4_DLM

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023