Oxford School of Photography

insights into photography

Lightroom tips: 6 quick tricks for giving your portraits a professional finish

Digital Camera World brings us this brief tutorial on using Lightroom. We teach a LR course that is very comprehensive but there are always tricks and special uses that can be learned from tutorials so if you use LR have a look here and see if you can improve your output

Lightroom_tips_for_portraits_NIK30.zone_3.step01

More and more lately we’re finding Adobe Lightroom is overtaking Photoshop as the program of choice for enhancing our portraits. At first glance, with its emphasis on tonal controls and presets, Lightroom may not seem like the ideal place to carry out detailed work like portrait retouching.

However, Lightroom was developed for editing photographs and it’s surprising how far you can take an image using a few simple tools and techniques.

A big part of retouching a portrait involves making adjustments to different areas of a face, and they’re usually the same adjustments every time: we lighten the eyes, soften the skin, boost the lips, sharpen the eye lashes, and tone down any bags under the eyes.

All these adjustments can be made with one powerful tool: the aptly named Adjustment Brush. We’ll use it here to give our portrait a fully professional finish.

Another important (if at times monotonous) stage of retouching is the removal of marks, spots and blemishes. Everyone has them, but what goes unnoticed in a moving person can spoil a static image.

In this area Lightroom is still playing catchup with Photoshop, but Lightroom 5 has taken a big leap forwards with the improved Spot Removal tool, which operates just like a brush……READ MORE HERE

One response to “Lightroom tips: 6 quick tricks for giving your portraits a professional finish

  1. Pingback: Journey Into Lightroom | The Road to the Future

Leave a comment