The Ultimate Lightroom Skin Tone Workshop + FREE Raw Files

what's up guys ryan here at signature edits and inside of this lightroom tutorial we're taking a look at better skin tones inside of lightroom so we're going to talk about the best possible techniques for improving the skin tones in your photos whether you're on lightroom classic or lightroom cc this video is going to be really helpful because i'm going to show you the best tips and tricks to getting better skin tones in your models and also just editing portraits in general so without further ado let's hit that intro and get into it [Music] all right so inside of this video you're gonna have the chance to actually edit along with me and that means that if you head to signatureedits.com free dash raw photos or hit the link in the description below you can download these raw files for free now these were all uploaded by awesome photographers like yourself so thank you to anyone whose photos are featured in here we've got larson ryan we've got a few anonymous photographers we've got anna matalis so make sure to check them out and thank them and tag them when you actually share your edits online and tag at signature edits code so i can see what you come up with so without further ado go ahead grab those files edit along with me or just watch it doesn't really matter and we'll get started together now before we actually dive in i do want to say obviously i've got a variety of skin tones in here but i don't have every skin tone represented that doesn't matter these techniques are going to apply no matter what color skin tone your subjects are working with okay so before we get a bunch of angry messages in the comments it's just what i had available so that's what i'm working with hope that's cool all right we're gonna head over and start by just looking at all of these photos together now i want you to notice we've got a few different kind of skin tones in general but we've also got a lot of different coloring and that's the thing about photography that no one really talks about that often and was super confusing to me when i started out was how do you actually fix a photo which looked really good in camera and then you get it back and you're like what is going on here now this one might be kind of impossible to fix anyways because we've got iso 6400 it was taken with a very very slow shutter speed and that's why it's all blurry it's really noisy but even more than that if we actually zoom in on our subject when you take the photo it might look fine to you everything looks good everything looks nice you take it you get it back into your computer at home and you realize oh the skin tones look really weird why is that well it's because your eyes when you're looking at different subjects different scenes different lighting conditions will adjust over time so what i mean by that is if you've ever actually gone um you're hanging out in your house at night time and you've got all the lights on and then you go over to the fridge you open up the fridge door and all of a sudden everything's blue it's like this blue light just floods out well during the daytime you wouldn't notice the fridge light was blue but at night time you do because all of a sudden all of these other lights are warm and yellow and your eyes adjust to that so it kind of compensates and then the camera doesn't compensate so that's why you're confused later on when you get home you're like what's wrong with this so that's really what causes that there's a few different fixes the main is going to always be your white balance so simply by adjusting our white balance making things a little bit cooler a little bit warmer we're going to be able to dial things in and get a much more pleasing skin tone so here's initially and here's after feels a lot better now how do you know actually what kind of skin tone you're going for or what temperature to set the photo to because although this looks better it still doesn't look great there's a few different ways to figure this out the first is to start with a reference photo in your library so for example this photo here i just grabbed and added to the collection because the skin is just beautiful this is really healthy looking skin it's nice magenta it's got some warmth to it it's not cold it's not washed out the texture the feeling just looks and feels good so my advice would be when you're starting out just use this little reference tool inside of lightroom hit this little come on let's head over here to our reference view and what we can do is actually drag this photo over here on the left and then when we're editing our other photos we can actually compare to a good example an example of what we're going for in terms of how the skin should look what sort of shade we're aiming for so now we can go over here to our white balance we can obviously cool this one down quite a bit we're going to add quite a bit of magenta because things are looking pretty green and that's much better so here's before and here's after so that's kind of my quickest easiest tip when it comes to actually adjusting and getting better skin tones use a reference photo because that will really help and prevent your eyes from adjusting because especially if you're editing photos from multiple multiple photos from the same shoot over time you just get used to looking at those photos and things look good even though you're in reality editing really weird colors it's because your eyes just get used to it over time all right i'm blathering on let's just edit together and show you what i mean most of the time you're gonna be able to just adjust the white balance and get the skin kind of 80 percent so obviously if the subject has a different skin tone then your comparison view it's going to be a little bit trickier but it can still be helpful to dial things in so here's before here's after just added some magenta cooled it down slightly now you're going to notice some other problems introduced when you do that in certain photos so this one obviously is really blue because we're taking this photo maybe around sunset but the shadows were really blue in terms of coloring so we can come down here to our hsl just take some saturation out of the blues and the aquas maybe add a little bit of luminance to the blues and the aquas and you cancel that out now overall this image if we're just going to do a basic edit to it we take our contrast down because it's very very high take the exposure up and take our dehaze up a little bit there you go so here's before and here's after skin looks a lot a lot nicer so we're going to come back to some other things in a minute but first let's just go through all these photos and practice together dialing in our white balance getting some better skin tones just with the really really basic tools and what i kind of like to say is at the end of the day most of your editing in lightroom doesn't come down to using really cool tricks and tips and secrets that no one else knows about it's being able to use the basic tools better than 99 of other people out there because your eyes are just adjusted your eyes are used to working with different colors and shades and nuances and you can pick out details and tune things more closely than someone else and so it's really about mastering the basic tools more than anything so here's before here's after and that's not a major shift but when you actually look at the before and after obviously it's going to make a big difference to our overall photo so again we'll just do a little bit of some basic editing i'll add some texture to sharpen it slightly a little bit of dehaze be a touch of saturation i'm going to drop the contrast a little bit and raise up our highlights so before and after really basic really subtle but the skin is much more healthy looking so you want to prevent kind of having that green tone to the skin all right now this subject obviously very very bright so we're going to start by just taking our exposure down zoom in here and i'm going to take my white balance up a little bit and my magenta up a little bit and if you don't know which direction to go kind of just play around see which feels better as you're going back and forth and you'll develop that skill as you go so in some cases you're going to find like this one it's both because our subject her skin has just less color overall than our reference photo but also white balance doesn't always do everything you need it to so that's when you go into the next tool which would probably be our hsl or our camera calibration so if i come down here to my hsl panel that's my color panel i've got it in this view where you just select hue saturation or luminance you can also hit all and we'll show you all of them and skin is generally found in the oranges and then a little bit in the reds a little bit in the yellows so what we can do is grab our yellows and take that instead of going towards green we'll take it towards magenta a little bit or towards just more of a reddish yellow we can do the same thing with our oranges you're going to see that if your white balance isn't enough you can dial it in by adjusting the hue just like that so here's before and here's after that's maybe a little bit too warm now so i'm going to take my white balance back down a little bit so before after let's take the exposure up so you can see it more accurately there we go okay let's go on to our next photo this one we already tackled a little bit so you can see once we put it next to a reference photo things still are very much not right so first off let's try by just start out by just fixing this noise reduction issue we'll add some sharpening to it take our masking up so we're not sharpening everything just the main details now if you ever are wondering about the sharpening panel i do have a video on it but really quickly holding down the alt or option key on your keyboard is really going to help you because you can dial things in much more quickly just holding down alt all these kind of secret views pop up and then you can dial in your photo much more closely okay so we're only going to sharpen the very big lines okay so here's before and here's after so slight improvement still not great but enough for us to match our skin tones now so we tried the white balance and that's kind of as far as we could get it here's before and here's after so it is better however we can do more so the next step would be to go to our hsl so we're going to grab our oranges take those towards magenta a little bit and then there's two options when it comes to adding color and kind of adding more depth to the skin first is to raise the luminance and make it kind of pop out from the background the other is actually to take the luminance down and take the saturation down and sometimes that'll actually give a nicer coloring to the skin so here's as is and then as i take the luminance down maybe to around there and then raise my highlights up hello we might have to do an adjustment brush so we're just selecting our subject so we'll do a brush like this and then we'll raise the highlights up and the whites up so here's before and here's after much nicer skin at least i hope you think so i think so we're gonna head into our next photo here because i think that's looking pretty darn good obviously it's way out of focus and very very soft so we could try adding a little bit of texture a little bit of clarity hopefully not in a brush we're actually doing something texture clarity little dehaze drop the black slightly and by slightly i mean a lot okay so here's before and here's after much better tones overall now it's still feeling not quite right so i might go down to my hsl again grab my yellows and take those because they're looking a little bit green slightly towards a warmer orange like that and the greens i'm going to do the same thing only i'm going to desaturate them because overall i don't really want any green in this image so i can actually take the saturation out it'll have better coloring to the photo overall and then these blues in the background this is no longer talking about skin tones but i feel like if we made them pop a little bit that would help the image overall so there's before and there's after still i could do a million other things to this photo but for the sake of time we'll keep going next shot zooming in okay we have nice skin but it doesn't have the same pop as this reference photo on the left so i think the tone overall is good just need to add some pop some texture obviously it's very out of focus so we'll start with that we'll add some texture a little bit of clarity a little dehaze we are getting closer and then i'm going to just grab my brush here and yes we're not directly dealing with skin tones but the thing is the skin tone itself can be great but if the other details aren't right it'll still feel off so hopefully you'll see what i mean as we fix some of these issues i'm just going to take texture up sharpness up like that i'm going to create another new mask another brush try and sharpen these lips okay so here's before and here's after miles and miles and miles better from where we started obviously it looks maybe a little bit too clarity and sharpened and stuff like that so we could dial that back a little bit and then go into our tone curve to add a little more pop to the skin so there's a couple ways you can add a little more pop a little more zest to the skin obviously we could try raising the highlights lowering the shadows just adding some contrast overall to the image but sometimes what's better is you actually take the contrast down in this main panel so you get things nice and flat and creamy then we're going to selectively add it back in the tone curve let's add just a little bit of pop in the mid tones and highlights take our whites down a little bit and you can take your midtones up just like that so here's before here's after and here's our totally before totally after it's looking a little bit cold so i'll warm it up ever so slightly good okay so now we haven't really talked about one other tool you do have available for your skin tones and because our skin is not perfectly kind of matchy all the way around here maybe we'll take a look at that but first i'm noticing if you look at her arms very very nice in magenta nice they're just more magenta than her chin and her head up here which looks much more yellow now that's going to be a combination of the fact that she's facing up so probably some of the light is reflecting off these tree branches all that green and adding that onto her skin especially on her face but it's also partially probably because of her hair reflecting as well either way we're going to counter it by cooling it down a little bit and then adding a little magenta so what i'm doing is i'm just trying to make the skin very cohesive and just blend all the way through lost my words there so here's before and here's after see how we're making much more consistent skin tone across the board and now that i've cooled it down a little bit hello i'm actually going to go in there make sure i extend it onto all of her hair or none of her hair good and then i can warm up the entire image as well so we'll take our overall white balance up a little bit like that before after so now it's much more even we can take it one step further again because her arms are still kind of a little darker and more magenta than the rest of the image grab a brush and we can raise the highlights a little bit maybe take our magenta down a little and our white balance down a little until things match really nicely somewhere around there okay overall before after and you can tweak that to your heart's content make it warmer darker i don't care you do you but we have improved and that's the main thing now the other portion of this that we haven't really used is the calibration panel now if you're in the lightroom cc version of lightroom or the mobile version you're not going to have access to this panel and that's okay this is just like an extra one that sometimes you can use if you're in classic we can grab our shadow tint play around with that grab our red tint play around with that and the reds is normally going to affect the skin more than anything else so we could take our saturation down maybe in the reds a little i like to take the greens up this way saturation sometimes you add saturation in one take it away in another get some interesting effects now i do have a full video on how the calibration panel kind of works and how you can get a much more detailed understanding of it you can check that out i'll try and link to it here if i don't forget but essentially there's two ways of using it one is to really correct the color in your image so for example if you find overall your shadows are too green like this photo we've got some kind of like really greenish brownish greens going on greenish brownish greens as opposed to the other type of greens so we can counteract that a little bit by adding some magenta to our photo and then we can take our green primary in this direction and our blues may be towards blue a little bit more so don't watch our model for a second just watch the background see how now the greens are much more green as opposed to before where they were like more of a murky sort of color so that's a different option that you have for adjusting things too that you can play with so here's before those adjustments and here's after we've made the greens a little bit more natural in terms of being green and the skin tone has been affected by that whether it's better or worse you can decide okay let's keep going good practice this girl looks like she's auditioning for a movie in which she is a stern character it's gonna say a horror movie but how would you like it if that was you in this photo and i said you look like you're just auditioning for a horror movie so i'm not going to say it i'm just going to say that i was thinking about saying it she looks like a pretty fun person okay so we're going to start by adjusting our white balance as per usual and we've got a reference photo so that's going to really help us dial things in nicely here's before here's after it looks pretty similar i've just brightened things up a little bit let's darken it before and after things are a little bit just more magenta a little bit possibly warmer i don't know you decide and then we can go down here and raise our highlights maybe drop the contrast and add some pop in our tone curve again same kind of deal and again if the tone curve is intimidating to you go ahead watch my tone curve video watch another chunker video on the internet it's definitely worth learning because there's a lot more nuanced adjustments you can make in the tone curve than just adding contrast or taking the highlights down in this main panel up here and lightroom actually treats it differently so if you raise the highlights in the tone curve it'll do a different thing than if you raise it in the main panel okay so we're getting sort of close this photo was taken indoors which is why this light is definitely not going to be exactly the same as this one which was taken outdoors but i think overall we could probably take a little saturation out of the oranges and then add some saturation to the entire image so we're going to take the vibrant slider up and that's going to adjust our other colors more than it's going to adjust our skin tones so as i do this and take the vibrance up to 100 that compared to saturation to 100 very different result in the skin tones so i'm going to take my vibrance up just add some pop to the image overall here's before here's after it's a little magenta a little warmth a little bit more color and pop to our image and that's without really doing much else at all so of course then you could do your stylistic stuff whether that's adding a little texture and some clarity or taking some clarity away sometimes that can be cool take the clarity down and de-haze up that'll smooth out your skin now another thing that i should probably show you is some really easy ways of making your skin feel really nice and soft and glowing and beautiful first thing you can grab a brush you can literally just brush on the skin like this everywhere that doesn't have detail and then my favorite fastest way to do this is just to take the contour contrast down a little bit and then texture you can take that way down clarity down a little bit dehaze down just a bit so here's before and here's after just cleans things up nicely you can add a little bit of pop maybe by raising the whites and the highlights slightly of course you should be selecting your mask when you do that or it won't do much just like that so that's one way to do it however i'm doing that with 500 photos it can take a while so you decide another quick way to do it would be to go to create new mask let's first delete this one create new mask we're going to go to color range you can dab it onto our subject skin and you're going to see lightroom has said okay everything that's a similar skin tone here you go ryan which is great lightroom but you've done a kind of crappy job in that it's selected everything in the photo so we can take this refine mask and take it down until it's hopefully just selecting the face or colors that are very similar to the color i selected now if it's not grabbing everything in terms of the skin tone you can hit shift on your keyboard that'll bring up this little plus icon and you can expand that mask onto other areas of the skin and then again refine it from there so the mask isn't perfect it's selecting other parts of the image which isn't ideal but in this particular photo none of those are going to be super important if i make them softer and kind of take the detail down so what i can do now is kind of the same thing and take our contrast down that'll add some nice glow just by itself and even things out take the texture down clarity down the haze down and just like that we smooth out the skin very very nicely pretty quickly and a lot more accurately than trying to do it with a brush there's before after and here's before just you can compare now obviously you dial it in as necessary so maybe we wouldn't want to take it down quite so much we still want the skin to have some texture to it it's just that can be a really quick trick for smoothing out skin especially if you're working with a subject who doesn't have really beautiful perfect skin at the time of the shoot okay let's move on we got a few more photos to practice on and then we're done so let me just say if this video has been helpful can you do me a favor hit that like button and leave me a comment just so i know and can make more videos like this rather than stuff that's not helpful for you i'd rather create things that actually is is are are helpful for you okay so white balance really quickly and simply we can adjust and make our skin better next step is going to be coming down here to our saturation luminance and hue i'm going to take the saturation i will leave that for now we're going to take our oranges over towards magenta a little bit our yellows over towards orange quite a bit our reds if we compare the lips the reds are not even that red so i can maybe take that towards magenta as well and then overall the skin could just be a lot darker i think that would help obviously this was taken with some really harsh light so if we take the luminance down a little bit we might get some nice results right see how i grab the luminance down i'm not adding saturation to the lips but there naturally is just going to be more color so we can do that little trick for you okay so here's before and here's after we're definitely much much better there's a few other things we can do so let's do them now first off i might add a little saturation to our skin just a little bit and then desaturate the reds just a bit somewhere like that i'm going to hit k on my keyboard or just hit this little thing add an adjustment brush and i'm going to brush on these really really harsh spots on her face we're going to try and tone those down so any area that's really really bright or clipped we're going to try and fix that it's going to take our contrast down in those areas texture down clarity down now i found in lightroom in general you're going to get better results by doing a little bit at a time rather than trying to get it all done with one brush and being super extreme so i'm going to try and take things back a little bit but not totally fix the problem so here's before and here's after it's not perfect but if we add another brush we'll get one step closer so we're going to do the same thing add another brush and this time i'm going to try and add a little bit of color now this might not work sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't so what i'm going to do hit this little color panel and i'm actually going to click and drag onto my reference photo and as i do that you're going to see that it's going to select whatever color i'm hovering on on the photo so that can be helpful sometimes this works sometimes it doesn't work so well you can also grab a different color somewhere else on the skin of your subject so let's go with say her forehead color just like that and then we can take our saturation down so all we're adding is that color take the saturation of our color up like that and then just play around until you get the right shade somewhere around there is probably right and take your saturation back up a little bit okay take highlights back we're going to try and take the contrast down and again we're just repeating the process overall take our texture down a little bit clarity down hit o if you ever want to see your mask and just sort of refine it okay so here's before and here's after so again it's not perfect but it's better so you can continue down that route and eventually you're going to get something you're happy with i don't want to get rid of all the highlights particularly what i'm trying to do is just get rid of kind of this textured dotty white sparkles that aren't super flattering so what we can do here zoom in so we can really see what we're doing you could use your eraser brush to get rid of some of these larger blemishes we're going to set it to heal instead of clone and lightroom will do its best to figure out what that texture should have been and we could even play around and try and do that with some of these really harsh spots too and it's just a matter of being patient figuring it out that's the thing when it comes to skin tones and just editing inside a lightroom it's about patience and making tiny little improvements 10 10 10 10 percent a little bit here a little bit there and all of a sudden you've really improved the photo overall so here's before and here's after if you can't see that difference keep practicing eventually you will now we're gonna do that same technique as before i'm gonna grow i'm gonna grow i'm gonna i wish i could grow five foot seven man never changed okay let's go over to color range same thing we're gonna dab like that and we've selected our model nice and this mask actually looks good to me that's perfect just as is do the same thing as we did before so our contrast down texture down clarity down dehaze down something like that sharpness down a little bit you can see that skin looks so much better than it did beforehand here's before and after and then lastly of course sometimes simply the contrast of sharp next to not so sharp can make the not so sharp seem even dreamier and creamier so what i mean is we're going to grab the areas of the image that should be really sharp so the eyelashes the eyes tip of the nose lips that kind of thing take our texture up clarity up dehaze up sharpness up so here's before here's after also we could take our highlights up a little bit in those areas okay so if we see our before and our after we've made some massive improvements in this image overall now of course just for stylistic stuff we could do all sorts of other things but this is a skin tone tutorial however chance is just kind of fun and i like having fun we're going to select the subject with the subject auto mask i'm going to hit the apostrophe key on our keyboard that's going to select the background now i can blow out the background maybe let's see how that looks texture down clarity down dehaze down make it really creamy something like that or i could go the other way take the background down in opacity in opacity in brightness and maybe add some saturation for some pop or you could do the total opposite and desaturate it a million different options world is your oyster i'm gonna go a little bit brighter a little bit more airy like that i'm just gonna then i'm gonna just raise the highlights a little bit on our photo and something like that perfect okay we got four more we're gonna blast through these we're gonna zoom in her skin is pretty darn beautiful as is of course the thing you want to go for when it comes to touching up portraits touching up skin tones is just consistency so if you look at her skin it's a little bit warmer over here her knee obviously is darker then we've got some different bruises and some different blemishes that we could fix and that's what we would spend our time on if i were adjusting this image in depth so to start with let's go ahead and just do our overall color range trick create new mask color range select a skin tone point lightroom is going to say hey do you want this you're going to say no you suck lightroom take your refine mask down all the way so it's not grabbing everything and then hold down shift to get a couple more spots on your subject and hopefully get a mask that's going to save you some time okay not ideal because it's also grabbing this bralette and whatever else that thing is called so what we can do here is go to subtract brush and just erase our mask off the areas we do not want masked so our brush can grab this bralette thingy and then we can also do the same thing on the outside areas of the image so the sunset kind of thing okay so let's say we've got our mask kind of where we want it same thing texture down dehaze down contrast down sharpness down and somewhere along the line i took something too far because it looks a little weird there and take our highlights up a little bit that'll make the skin pop nicely we could even add maybe a touch of saturation like that so here's before and after let's try this again before after now sometimes that trick's not going to help you too much oh lightroom totally froze hello because you can see we've got some weird banding going on as a result of that mask so you just need to watch sometimes that trick works sometimes it's better off to do it naturally or to use a different auto mask tool so we could go up here do our masks again go select subject and then instead of just desaturating or detecturizing or declarifying the entire subject we can go up here to the subtract yellow go to our brush and do the same thing just subtract the areas that we want to maintain our detail so this bra thingy our flower headband and our hair you don't have to be too careful about this because all you're really doing is taking away detail in the mask you're not going to be super extreme so it's not going to be super noticeable if your mask isn't perfect okay so just the areas you want to stay sharp and textured make sure to select those like that good undo your super weird bizarre adjustments and then we can take our texture down clarity down contrast down a bit highlights up a little bit of saturation something like that before after okay and then we'll just go in and the other areas of the skin that is not perfect we can zoom in grab our little band-aid icon now with legs i feel like on on the face you want to have pores that's important on the legs you can actually smooth these out quite a bit more and get away with it so that's what we're going to try and do here okay let's say i went through and i grabbed all those spots this one's really sloppy we'll delete that next i'm just going to grab a brush hit k on my keyboard instead of lightroom classic or go up to create new mask just select the legs and because there's no other detail around here in this image i don't have to be super careful about it and do the same thing as before just take our clarity and our texture down clarity up maybe texture all the way down that'll maintain these harsher lines and make sure her legs still appear to be nice and sharp on the edges okay and then we zoom in you can see things feel a lot better obviously my mask is kind of sloppy so you should make sure you do a better job than me hello like i saw okay so keep it going this one obviously is our reference we'll keep going this one be aware that subjects standing under trees in a grassy park all that light is reflecting off of everything in your scene so the sun is hitting the tree the tree is green and reflecting greenish light onto your subject which is why if you look in the subjects shadow areas so under her chin whatever these areas are really green as from that reflected light because there's no direct light on her only reflected light coming up from the grass the trees whatever so let's start out with our white balance very good very good and from there you can actually go down to your hue and saturation even target the green sometimes can be nice so we'll take our greens and warm them up a little bit yellows will take those towards more of a magenta and desaturate them slightly and same with the greens okay the blue in this image i think i could actually desaturate it all the way and maybe even take our luminance up in the blues it's not really adding to the image it's just adding some extra color that isn't matching the rest of the scene and then our skin tones themselves look not too too bad we can maybe take our oranges towards magenta slightly and either add a little bit of saturation or try lowering the luminance so if we lower the luminance just a bit like that and then add a bit more pop in our tone curve how do you like that before after okay now whether or not you like the rest of the image that's going to take some extra editing figure that out on your own but hopefully you see the benefit and of course we could go in here with our classic color range trick or with our select subject and you're going to grab your mask go to subtract brush and subtract everything that is not meant to be selected not super fast not super quick but it is going to be a really nice accurate mask for you in terms of the edges of this image of our subject good good good good and then my go-to just take texture clarity down dehaze down a little bit contrast i find really is just an easy way of brightening the skin and also just overall making the skin a little bit softer and you can add a little bit of pop with your whites like so uh and then i think our background we could maybe add a little bit of pop so we'll go select subject again hit the apostrophe key on your keyboard that'll invert it and we can take our background down in terms of exposure up in terms of saturation maybe texture down a little bit clarity down a little bit and dehaze down a little bit before apres cool cool all right lastly again this is an example of greens really reflecting all over the place which is why her skin particularly the shadows where no natural direct light is hitting it's very very green tinged so let's start by just dialing in what we can with our white balance so we'll cool it down add some magenta and add some exposure those three tools once you dial those in and really become a master of them are going to make a massive difference in your photography honestly the best photography tool you could master best trick you could learn is to really get good at white balance and seeing what things should look like being able to dial that in okay so we've gone from here to here definitely an improvement already now let's deal with all of these shadow areas which are still quite green we're going to go down to our hsl panel go to our yellows try taking those towards magenta so here's before after before after so i'm going to take it all the way because in this photo i think that works it's looking fine zoom in a little bit more come on you got this ryan you can do it take your saturation down in the yellows a little and then maybe the luminance down in the oranges just to add some more color to her skin overall so you can see here's before and here's after her skin just appears to have more color even though all we've done is made it darker and then to raise it back up we go to our tone curve raise our midtones up because that's where her skin is living and then take the shadows down a little bit to add some punch so here's before here's after just like that voila maybe i went a little bit cold we could warm it up and then the rest is just gravy what do you want to do do you want to desaturate the yellows and the greens maybe raise the luminance of the greens and the blues go for more of a pastel feel you can take that towards aqua let's go nuts and then you can go down to your calibration panel easy way to get that teal and orange look take your hue of the blues down in terms of your blue channel take your greens uh this way and then just balance out the reds because now the skin tones look too red so we could try taking it this way like that go back to our hsl kind of increase the luminosity of those channels and it's not like i know exactly what i'm doing here i'm just sort of playing around feeling what looks good and works good based on my hunches so before after kind of different and of course there's a million other things you could do if the skin is still too orange then we know we just or two red we go back to our hue take our skin this way until we're happy because i'm happy clap along if you feel like a dude okay so now that i'm singing songs going a little bit crazy by myself it's clearly time to be done i hope this video has been helpful in some way shape or form if it was you do me a big favor hit that like button and leave a comment below really really helps me out if you want to pay it forward to all the other awesome photographers who are uploading photos like these so you can practice yourself go ahead signature editors.com free dash raw dash photos you can upload a couple of your own favorite images maybe get featured here on the channel and make sure to tag them if their name is in the file name here otherwise tag at signature edits code so i can see your awesome work all right bit of a long one hopefully it was helpful i'll see you next video in the meantime create something awesome peace you

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 1,449

Keywords: photo skin tones, lightroom, photography, photo editing, portrait skin tones, portrait photography, edit better skin tones

Id: LEbbCxANOzc

Length: 41min 8sec (2468 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021