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Retouching People

Lesson 16 from: Lightroom Desktop for the Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

16. Retouching People

Learn how to retouch blemishes and other skin issues on people in your photos using the healing brush in Lightroom Desktop.
Next Lesson: Masking Skin

Lesson Info

Retouching People

now, let's go from here, let's go to an actual person and let's retouch that person and we'll get a sense of what we need to do there. So now we're looking at a person and we're gonna do some retouching on this person. But before we start retouching her, I want to zoom in and look at the quality of her skin. And so if you look at that, it's fairly rough. There's a lot of detail in the skin and the less detail we get in the skin, the softer and more beautiful looks. With the exception of going to the point that it looks plastic. Um but what you see here is a lot of rough nest to that skin and that's not because her skin is rough. It's actually because lightroom tends to want to make everything a 40 sharpness. And like I told you before, sharpness on a landscape at 40 is great, but on skin you don't want it to be that sharp. So I'm gonna take the sharpness down and we're gonna go and remember, you can open up the sharpness panel and look at all of the controls. So we're actually going to...

take the sharpness down to about 20 or so And then we can take this radius anywhere between about one and say 1.7 is pretty nice and that kind of softens up that skin just a bit. We still have nice sharp eyes. So that works. Um it just softens up some of the pores and things like that. So that's our first battle is trying to smooth the skin just naturally by not having too much sharpening in the actual detailed area. The next thing that we want to do is go into our healing brush. So again the healing brush is right below the crop tool. It looks like a little band aid. We're going to click on it and I always want to be in hell, not clone heal cloning. You can use the clone tool for things, but in most cases you'll find that the healing brush is the way to go. And I'm gonna put my healing brush at a feather of about 50% or 60%. So when you're doing skin and you're retouching out blemishes, you definitely want a bit of a feather to that brush. So I've got a feather of around 50 or 60% and the opacity is up at 100%. So now I'm going to zoom into the skin and I'm going to change the size of my brush with the bracket keys. So I'm just gonna bring that down and I'm just gonna start clicking on things that need to be altered and you'll notice that if I pull away I can see what it looks like without those pins in the way. And that was kind of selecting the wrong place. So I'm just going to go over to their um and I'm gonna change the size of the brush as needed to get these smaller areas and then sometimes I can click and drag over a set of blemishes so that I don't have to do each one individually and if there happens to be a bigger one, I can do that as well. So I'm just going from blemish to blemish looking for the ones that are pretty obvious and they cause a problem on the skin for me at a distance. Remember you're not going to be looking at a photo in this close proximity ever. And so don't get too minute and don't get too crazy about like, oh, I got to get every single little blemish in every single little mark on her skin because quite frankly you're not gonna see most of them when you're at the proper viewing distance. And again, you hold down the space key and that allows you to move the canvas around. So I'm just looking for those things that are obvious blemishes that I would see at a distance. She does have some freckles and we're going to leave some of those freckles. So we're just looking for the ones that look like they have some three dimensionality to them or they look a little bit rough and not attractive. So freckles can be quite alluring. So we want to leave those as much as possible. Um so I'm just looking for those things that need, That are kind of catching the light and becoming three dimensional is more of my concern. Oh, and then I've got some little dry flecks of skin, those tend to call attention to themselves pretty easily. So little dry flecks of skin always need to come off. Okay, so now let's zoom out and see. We got rid of all of the obvious blemishes, but now I want you to see certain other things. So there are areas in the skin that are kind of have this weird shadow on them or they have a rough patch or something like that. So we're gonna zoom back into those and now what we're going to do is increase the size of the brush and even increase the size of the feather. And now I'm just gonna go in and work on rough patches like this patch right here. Just going to go like that, it's choosing a different area. It's got to be fairly similar. But then I'm just going to take the opacity down so it's zero. And as I increase the opacity, I start to remove that blemish or that rough patch of skin and I can do the same thing for right here And see the feathers or the opacity still at 65% because I kind of found a good opacity. And so I'm going to do the same thing for this kind of cleft in her chin. So it's gonna soften up that cleft, it's not going to remove it completely, but it's gonna soften it up just a bit. So I'm just kind of moving it over. Oh, and see see how I'm getting all sorts of detail, but that's kind of a soft area. So I'm gonna actually move it to a different place. So I'm moving it somewhere else where I've got softer skin. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the opacity way down and just start to bring it in until it softens up that cleft a little bit too much There, that just softens it up at third at 20%. And then I'm going to go look over here. I don't like that little black area and so on this one again, I can either choose a place on her skin or I can even go right out here to the sky and then just kind of change the opacity until that sky starts to overcome that shadow a bit. So what I'm doing is I'm increasing this opacity and I chose sky because it softens up that area and I just bring it up until it kind of overcomes those shadows a bit and I'm going to do the same thing for this whole cheek area here because it is way overly. Um it's got a weird darkness to it. So I'm just doing the whole cheek and then we're going to go right back out here over the sky and then bring that down just a little bit, so there's a soft transition there and then we're going to zoom out and see what that looks like. Okay, that's pretty good, There's there's a little bit of roughness over here. But you can see how I can take care of most of her issues on her skin just by taking care of the blemishes and these little and she's got some interesting dark areas on her skin. And so I'm going to take care of those just by choosing a different spot and then just playing around with the opacity until it softens that up. And a lot of the times this is really good for like, bags under the eyes, but she's she's fine in that regard. And it also can help with if you have wrinkles. So let's say we wanted to get rid of this wrinkle line. Just follow the wrinkle line and then take it up where there's no wrinkle line and then I can just either have it or remove it or have it softer so that it's there. But it's just not quite as prominent. And I could do the same thing with all of her wrinkle lines. So you can do that with uh you know, right on the edge of the eyes. So there's plenty of ways that you can soften up skin. And then of course we're going to talk about masking in a minute and we will show you how to mask skin so that we can soften up the skin even more, but now we've at least removed all the blemishes. So now her skin looks very natural and looks very good, but it doesn't look like it has a lot of blemishes. So that is the retouching tool. Remember that you're going to stay in the healing option all the time. The only time you ever want to go into a stamp tool is when you're trying to replicate something, you're trying to put another face over here, you're trying to put another uh window on something or another brick or something like that where you're copying and pasting something. But otherwise for healing, we want to be able to take things and move them and then let the computer do the merging work for us.

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Jean McMillan
 

Thoroughly enjoyed your class, have learned so much about how take my Ipad to another level, now can't wait to put it all into practise!

Red Tulip
 

Sometimes it's hard to know what the instructor is pointing to so it's easy to get confused. Better job is needed in explaining what you are pointing to.

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