From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Quick portrait retouching

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Quick portrait retouching

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- [Instructor] Hello friends and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode I want to share with you some portrait retouching techniques but I want to start off with talking about how we can find or select the keepers from a set of photographs like these right here. To do that, I'll go ahead and tap the E key in order to go to the loop view and also minimize things a little bit so we can see the first photograph. Now this one is completely out of focus. (laughs) Please tell me this happens to you. You get to a location, you're excited, you capture the image, and your settings are all wrong, right? So then I correct my settings a little bit. This one's a little bit better but she's too close to the wall. Can you see this crack here in the background? It's too noticeable. So what I need to do is to have her step forward. So I take another image. That's an in-between moment, obviously not very good. Have her step forward. Now we're talking. Can you see how that starts to fade away? And if we zoom in on the image we can check our exposure. This one's tack-sharp. Love the expression, love the mood. We'll go to another one here. Again, had her just slightly turn so you can see the difference there, like that one. And then another one with a smile and still one more. So out of these I'm obviously looking for one which has nice mood, nice expression, and I want to zoom in to make sure that my sharpness is right because it's a really shallow depth of field. The eyebrows are out of focus. I need to make sure the eye is sharp. And there's me, you can see my little reflection there in the eye. So let's work with this image. It's a pretty simple process. In Lightroom I tap the R key to go to the Crop tool. Now here's something I like to do when I crop portraits. I like to go to four by five aspect ratio. The reason is, is it's the same aspect ratio that is used for Instagram and I just like the way portraits look when they're cropped to that aspect ratio. So here, let me just have fun with cropping a little bit, cropping in, so we're really brought in to the subject's face there. Next, a few simple basic adjustments. Go ahead and bring my exposure up and contrast. That's when it gets fun, right? When you start to see how the image comes to life as you move these sliders around. Exposure's up, contrast up, highlights down. A little boost in the shadows, just lift those up a little bit. Not too much, right? A little boost. And then drop the blacks down as well. Okay, well here inside of Lightroom that's basically all I want to do. Now there's more that I could do for retouching. If you zoom in on this you can see there's these little flyaway hairs. You can also see there's a little bit of a shadow underneath the eye. Now I want to brighten the eye but I can do all of that a lot quicker in Photoshop. So I'm sending this file to Photoshop by pressing Command E on a Mac or Control E on Windows and then here in Photoshop I'm going to do some quick retouching. So I create a layer. We'll call this one R1 for retouch one, we're going to select the spot healing brush. Here it is. Sample all layers. The reason why I'm choosing that, so that when I use this tool, tapping the left bracket key to make the brush smaller, when I use it and retouch away an issue it's on a new layer so that if I make a mistake I can always undo that. So this is a non-destructive way to retouch your photographs. Some lint on the sweater there, I need to remove that. And this first level of retouching is all about zooming in super close, getting the things that you don't notice when you're far away but you will notice if the image is printed or if you really get close to it. So in this case I always want to clean up all this little stuff right here, right? And I'm just using the spot healing brush to do so. This isn't rocket science but it is about moving around. Press the spacebar key to do that, and then finding little areas that you want to retouch away. You don't need to retouch away every little thing, right? Because you want the image to have a nice natural feel. I do want to get rid of a little bit of this crack I'm kind of seeing in the back wall over here. If you want more control, use this healing brush here. Sample all layers as well and then we can Option or Alt click to set the source area. Then we can retouch away any little things that we're seeing either in the background that are distracting or on the subject. Speaking of that, it looks like this is not a very good retouching job right there, so I'm going to Option or Alt click that and then paint over that to fix up that little area. I need to fix some of the retouching I had done earlier, it wasn't the best. Alright, it's looking better. Next let's work on the shadows. So we can create a new layer, call this one R2 for retouch two. With the spot healing brush and also the clone stamp, we're going to zoom in to brush a little bit bigger, Option or Alt click on a good source area, just start to paint over the shadow a little bit. And what we'll do is we'll do this on both sides and sometimes as you do this you're going to start to notice other areas that might need a little bit of help. Grab our clone stamp tool. Clone stamp, zero percent hardness. Opacity, drop that bad boy down somewhere below 50 percent. 20, 30, something like that. It doesn't really matter. Sample all layers, Option or Alt click, and what this can do is it can just put a general color, kind of fix over this area. That opacity was too high. Sometimes with the healing it can have a little bit sort of a bleeding effect and this can help to fix that. And so here I'm just going to go ahead and paint over some of these areas, just looking to try to bring in a little bit nicer look here on a couple spots like this. So let's take a look at how we're doing. Here's before and after. And if ever you feel like something is too strong, you can always erase it, right? You can go in there and just take it out altogether, or you can just drop the opacity of this entire layer down, which is typically what I do. So you just drop that down. So you're removing the shadows but not obliterating them, right? And so just looking for that right intensity of that amount. Alright, well there you have it. Some quick little retouching that we're going to do with this photograph. Last but not least, I like to have contrast and a lot of color here so I'm going to add a Curves adjustment and just brighten this up. And I should say, this actually shouldn't be my last but not least adjustment because I want to do something to the eyes. I forgot to do that. Let's go to our before and after. Looking good. There we go. Okay, let's finish this one off with the eyes. This is really fun. So what we can do with the eyes is create a Curves adjustment and I'm going to exaggerate it. Just brighten it up. It looks horrible. Stick with me. Go to the Mask tab. Click invert. This Curve adjustment is now masked off. Nothing's happened. Grab your brush. Brush, we want no hardness, a nice small brush. And opacity, let's drop that down pretty low and then we're just going to start to paint in a little bit of brightness into the eye. So I'm going to paint a little bit less on this back eye because it's a little bit more in the shadow over there, right? And if you look at this, can you see how I'm brightening up the eye there? Adding in a little bit more of that effect. We can go back to the Curve icon here. Click on the Curve icon and we can control that. We can say hey, let's add a little bit of contrast there too. So now we have that nice little beautiful snap of color. And then if we want to change color-- I shouldn't say beautiful snap of color. Beautiful snap of brightness, right? But if we want to change that we can go into Channels. Check this out. If you click on the RGB pull-down menu and go to blue. I'm going to exaggerate for a moment, but drag up. Can you see I'm adding blue? Drag down, I'm adding yellow. So if I just drag up a smidge, I can add a hint of blue into that part of the image there too. When you go back to the Mask tab, if you feel like your brushstrokes are a little bit too defined, increase the feather value. What that will do is it will soften the overall adjustments that you've made. And then of course you can go back and you can use your brush and you can paint these in now that you're seeing the color that you have and maybe the effect that you want to have in that and you can also paint it out if you feel like hey, in certain areas it just wasn't looking very good. Now if we look at our before and after, for me the color is too strong. So go back to the Curve, go to the blue channel, and the intensity is how far I drag this up, right? So I just need a little teeny bit of blue. The trick with eyes is you want them to look realistic, right? Not over done or over the top. And with this one I can also decrease this by decreasing the opacity of the layer. And I tend to go pretty subtle with the eyes, but to demonstrate it I cranked it up so you could see how that was working. Alright, where there you have it. Our quick retouch. Here's the before. Zoom in so you can see that a little better. Here's the after. The reason I wanted to do this is because often people work in Lightroom and they finish their images in Lightroom and they forget these last few little steps. And sometimes these can really help. Also if you want to learn more about retouching, I have a course which goes through all different types of retouching techniques and you can always dig into that one in order to learn more about this topic. But for now we have accomplished our task for today. I hope you enjoyed this one and I look forward to seeing you in another. Have a fantastic rest of your day. Bye for now.

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