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.