Friday, December 4, 2009

Portrait in a Box: Part 2 (Lightroom Retouching)

Quick Lightroom fixes for portraits. I touched on some of these techniques in an earlier post but I wanted to talk a bit about building presets for your retouching to make the process simple and fast.
This post is dedicated to quick Lightroom fixes. Using the photo from the part 1 post; These are the presets that I like to use when gently retouching a portrait. We start by building the presets. There are three that see the most use. They are: Brighten Eyes, Soften Skin, and Whiten Teeth. these seem to cover the bulk of fixes aside from cloning blemishes.
Here are the settings that I like.
Brighten Eyes
    Exposure +.25
    Brightness + 5
Soften Skin
    Clarity -50
    Sharpness-25
Whiten Teeth
    Brighten +5
    Saturation -30

After each of these choose: "Save Current Settings as preset" and name them accordingly.
You have a lot of latitude to increase the individual sliders after you have brushed over the affected area. I like to keep things natural and try not to make the changes too obvious. the teeth have a huge impact as digital cameras seem to yellow them badly. this is a fast way to clean up a few things and greatly improve your finished product.
 
These are the before and after for my purposes. gentle teeth whitening, blemish removal, eye brightening and skin softening. I also vignetted the image a little bit to center the focus on the subject.

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