Lessons

Lesson Info

Portrait of a Woman

Welcome to this new full editing session in this one we're going to be editing this portrait of a woman right here and it's going to look something like this on the right after we're all said and done. Go ahead and open up this file. It's just called Portrait of a woman. And it's in your full editing sessions, download that you downloaded earlier on in this section of the course. Alright so let's get going into this. We're going to be using a lot of the techniques that we learned in the section on advanced sort of portrait enhancements. And so first let's go to the unedited version, the way that I've done that is I've created a new copy. So if you haven't learned this yet, just right click any photo and choose create virtual copy. This doesn't create a new copy on your computer. Just one right within light room that you can actually edit differently and then I reset it. So first things first I always like to crop my photos. So I'm going to take my crop tool up here. I'm going to bring ...

it in holding the shift button to make sure it locks this aspect ratio. I just want to cut out some of that headroom and just get a little bit closer to this woman just so that we are more focused on her and we can see more detail. Her head is going to be more or less centered. Not using really the rule of thirds other than having her head and her eyes in the sort of upper third. I could go in here even more, something like this might be a more ideal portrait sort of framing something like that. It feels a little off balance though the way that she is actually leaning over this rail. So I'm gonna leave it like something like this. I do want to get her whole hand in here and so something like that looks pretty good. Next I'm going to adjust the exposure with these sliders right now. The white balance looks pretty good. I might warm it up later on. But for now I just want to play with the exposure. Typically with raw photos, which most of these photos you're editing that you have for download our raw photos, it's going to come in sort of like a flatter, not as contrast you look. And I personally like to add a bit of contrast. I'm gonna bring down these blacks down here -30 or so the white, I am losing a little bit of detail on her face. I don't think that's the whites as much as the highlights. So I'm going to just leave the whites as is shadows. I'm just going to bring down a tidbit just to get a little bit more contrast in her hair and then the highlights. I'm actually gonna bring down just a little bit too to get back some of that information in our face if I zoom in here and I bring the highlights back up. Just notice on our cheeks, we still have that information but bringing down the highlights just a little bit, gets a little bit more of that information back with a portrait. I'm not going to increase the saturation. I do want to see about just increasing the vibrance, just a little bit just to get a little bit more color. There's not too many colors in this photo in its raw form. You have her red lips. But aside from that it's really just some gray, some brown, some really neutral colors and that's completely fine. But I think adding a little bit of vibrance helps portraits. I never really add clarity or d haze that tends to make things a little bit messy for me. And so I leave those blank tone curve. I save for the end, personally. Maybe you'd start with the tone curve to get your contrast. But I'm going to just leave it as is now with this portrait. I'm not really going to dive into any of these other options right this second. I'm going to dive into using my brushes to really dive in and start editing some of the details on her face. So what I'm gonna do is take our brush right here, I am going to zoom in. I just use the keyboard shortcut to zoom in Z. And now I'm just gonna start with softening her skin. So softening her skin. I'm going to use the brush that we learned how to use previously called softened skin. What I did tell you last time when we learned about this is this might be a little extreme. I'm going to see how it looks and then I'm going to tone it down or leave it as is I also want to turn off auto mask that sometimes works, but for this purpose I'm not going to want that on. I'm going to increase my brush size just a little bit and to see my mask overlay. I can just press o on the keyboard or check this box down there. So just notice what happens when I brush on and it might be actually better to turn off mask overlay so that I can really see what this brush is doing as I do it. So see what's doing. It kind of looks like it's in some parts darkening a little bit, but really what it's doing is just smoothing out some of those details and it just creates sort of a nice, softer looking skin. Now, of course this is a preference may be the person that you're photographing doesn't want this. And I always say that, you know, I'm not here to change household looks. I just want to enhance whatever they think they might want in this example. I am going a little bit more extreme than I typically would on my own. So this is definitely a style more of a commercial style edit. But it's definitely something that a lot of people are interested in doing. So just by using this brush right here, we get rid of a lot of those sort of details, The small pimples and things that might be appearing on her skin. I'm going to bring my brush size down and you can notice that I'm still using the same brush. I'm just using a smaller version of the brush to get in here and really in between her eyes and her eyebrows to lose some of these details. Cool so that's looking pretty good. So let's zoom out and we can look at the before and after with the backslash button and that was actually this is the and at it. I didn't realize that that was going to do that. So let's actually turn this on and off with this button down here. See you lose some of those details but it looks a lot softer and definitely more of that sort of portrait fashion um style. So that's a key note if you have created a virtual copy and you were doing the before and after with the backslash button that actually reverts to the virtual copy settings that I had already done. So make sure that if you're going to do multiple copies, you might want to create a copy before you start editing. Alright so next I'm just gonna get rid of this blemish up here with my healing brush tool up here or the spot removal brush. So I'm just going to select on that. My size looks good right now. So I'm gonna click there. Looks pretty good. I'm actually going to take this sort of spot that it chose and move it up here too blunt. Use that part to blend now I'm just going to click done. Looks pretty good to me. Alright, so there's a couple more things that I want to do with brushes first. Let's focus on her eyes. So let's take a brush. We're going to reset the brush just by double clicking effect. You have um an iris enhanced brush and what this does is it increases the saturation and clarity and exposure just a little bit. So I think when I did this myself, I actually um did a custom brush myself, but you can just use this virus enhanced. Now I'm going to press o to see the selected mask overlay and see what is actually selected and that's looking pretty good. This also might be an area actually where you would have wanted to turn the auto mask on. So let me actually erase this and show you what auto mask on would look like. Let's do auto mask on. We can choose our brush. So see how when I use the auto mask, it doesn't pick up as much of her pupil or this reflection. And that's actually what I want because I don't want that part to be enhanced by this brush now if you want it to go a little bit more to the extreme, you can increase the exposure. I might also warm up the eyes just a little bit, make them a little bit more brown if you want, you can completely change them to something like blue if you want. Just with the temperature, I don't want to get completely changed her eye color so I'm going to just warm it up just like that. Next I'm going to do another brush for her, the whites of her eyes. So this one, we don't have a brush yet. We do have teeth whitening which is kind of similar but I'm just going to click new brush double click effect to basically get rid of any of these settings. And then I'm going to turn auto mask on, make sure my brush size is small, just start right within the eyes and again I'm going to turn on my overlays pressing oh to see what I'm working with and this is where sometimes people have like more red veins in their eyes and that's something that you might want to get rid of. So pressing Oh and a couple of things that we can do to get rid of that D haze is actually one, you can go left on the D haze now if you go to the extreme it starts to look really fake but just just a little bit kind of blurring out any details by decreasing D haze and then also saturation, we're going to decrease now, if I go too far with saturation, it starts to look a little weird because there is some color in the eyes. It's actually a little bit blue right now and you also have that red but we're trying to get rid of the red as much as possible but something like that looks pretty good, we could turn these on and off and you can see just pay attention to the eyes starts to look a little bit better. Now you can go to an extreme, bring up the exposure even more. And also by doing this, you're helping the eyes to pop out and the eyes are the window to the soul, they are the main focus of most portraits and so making sure that the eyes pop, This is one way you can do it. Cool. So this is looking really good. The next thing we're going to do is move down to her teeth just a little bit yellow. So I'm gonna click new brush, we are just going to use the teeth whitening brush, I still have mask overlay on and so I'm going to turn on my masks overlay right, we have our auto mask on, that is what I meant now if I just brush over this. The reason why I want to have the mask, auto mask on and the mask overlays on for this brush is so that I can make sure that it's just selecting the teeth. Cool. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. Now, if I turn that off you can notice that what it did. It decrease the saturation here, boosted the exposure. So that tends to do pretty good. I'm actually going to increase the saturation just a little bit. We don't want to go too crazy with it. Cool. So that is looking pretty darn good. That's really all the brushes that I'm going to use right now in the other version of the portrait. If we go back to that version, I did boost the reds in her lips and the way that I did that in this edit is with the H. S. L. Tool down here. I just boosted the saturation of the reds. Now, what I could do actually, and I'm going to show you a different way of doing that in this version, is actually I'm going to use another brush so I'm going to take my brush tool click new For all of these. The density has basically been at 100, I'm going to decrease this to 50. Now I'm going to increase the saturation exposure. Just leave as is and now I'm going to make a little bit bigger and just brush over the lips right here. Maybe auto mask is a good idea with mask overlay so I can see what is being selected. So I'm not giving her this hot pink lipstick, this is just the mask overlay. And the thing with the density is that with the density not being at 100%, you can brush over multiple times. Okay so now I'm going to turn off that overlay and let's see what happened if I turned the saturation back as it was. Now I increase it, it's very subtle but it makes those lips pop. We can also adjust the tint adding more magenta. So if we delete this brush now we undo it. You can kind of see that we've added a little bit more of a pop of color. And the reason I like that a little bit better than using the H. S. L. Panel. Is that when I use the H. S. L. Panel we actually increased the reds that were in her hand right here. If we go back to the photo that I edited now if I zoom in you can kind of see that her hand has become really really pink and red versus the new photo. It's still pretty pink but it's not it doesn't have the added pink that we added with the increase in saturation of the reds in the H. S. L. Panel because we focus our brush just to her lips cool. So that's looking pretty good. There's just a couple of sort of global changes. I'm going to do one is I am going to warm up this photo so I'm back in my basic edits and I'm going to drag my temperature slider up, making it just a little bit warmer. If you like that kind of cool tone, then that could be something you want to go for. But I'm going to warm it up just a bit. I'm also going to add a little bit of blur so I'm going to use this radial filter technique. So clicking the radial filter, I'm going to click and drag an oval around our face. Actually had a previous setting set. So I'm going to undo that saturation just pressing oh, to make sure that the outside of the face is selected. Looks good. Press Oh again and I'm going to drop the sharpness all the way -100 and then clarity as well. Something like -33. Now this again draws our attention to her face. The issue is that sometimes this technique can look a little bit off because naturally more of this portrait would be in focus. So I'm actually going to use the eraser brush to erase some of this mask that I just added. So with this radial mass selected, click the brush button up here in the top of the mast settings. Think like a race down here and now I'm going to just a race, I can make this a little bit smaller. I'm gonna erase parts of our hair and you can really see what I'm doing if I show the mask overlay. And I'm gonna erase part of her jacket up here. Maybe even like her hand right here top of her head and again, just making sure that her entire face isn't focused. Now in some of the other edits I've shown you, I've got a little bit more creative with this technique where just literally the eyes are in focus or parts of the nose are in focus and the rest is a little bit blurred. But for this one, I do want to make sure that like her jacket front is in focus because this is such a cool sort of texture that adds to this picture and having it blurred out. Doesn't look as good to me. The last thing I'm going to do or two last things is to adjust the contrast if I want. I can use the tone curve. Just I'm using the linear curve. If you want to see the points down here, you can click this point curve option or you can just do a custom however you want. And I'm just going to add a little bit more contrast, definitely going for a little bit more of a fashion photo type, edit something like that. And then this is really the last thing I'm gonna do, which is a post crop vignette. Again, trying to focus the attention on her. So I'm going to bring up the feather all the way to hunt 100. That's my personal style. I don't like hard vignettes, the midpoint, I'm going to bring in. But the amount I'm actually going to drop back down. The amount is around negative 25 or so midpoint around 30, 25:30. And that's looking pretty good. Let's see how I did with comparing it to what I had edited previously. So the one on the right is the one that I'm currently editing. The one on the left is what it looked like um before or the previous edit that I practice on now for kicks and giggles. Let's just go ahead and reset, wow. So we went from that to that, that to that pretty good. Right. We can also do this comparison right here to see the before and after with the crop that we added. So a big change, definitely more of a fashion edit just to recap of what we did. We soften the skin, we enhanced the eyes. We also added a little bit of color to her lips. One thing I didn't do actually, I do had done in the edit practice said it was a little bit of contouring to her cheeks, which I used the contour brush that we had created or something similar. This face contour. So what I had done was enhanced her cheeks just a little bit just with a, with a little line like that. And then I also created a new brush like this. I increase the tint and the size and we added a little bit more color to her cheeks. Something like that can even add a little bit more color. So again, just adding a little bit more style to this, definitely. Let's go see the before and after again. So a lot of things we did so we did that face contouring. We enhanced the lips color, we widened the teeth. We added a little bit of blur to everything except for her face and some of the details. We added that vignette and of course we played around with the basic exposure and white balance setting to warm it up, awesome. Thanks so much for watching. If you have any questions, please let me know otherwise we'll see you in another lesson.