Reducing Shadows in Lightroom and Photoshop
Lesson 7 from: Portrait Retouching RedefinedChris Orwig
Reducing Shadows in Lightroom and Photoshop
Lesson 7 from: Portrait Retouching RedefinedChris Orwig
Lessons
Rethinking Retouching
10:36 2Basic Retouching Workflow in Lightroom
10:17 3Correcting Color Issues in Lightroom
07:56 4Small Blemishes in Lightroom
05:20 5Removing Distractions in Portraits
05:19 6Retouching Eyes and Fly Aways
20:42 7Reducing Shadows in Lightroom and Photoshop
08:56 8Liquify in Photoshop
03:32Lesson Info
Reducing Shadows in Lightroom and Photoshop
Let's do some other cleanup and fix up kind of work here and look at some different ways to do it he was some shadows and stuff like that so with this image what happens a lot when you shoot with natural light and I don't use modifiers except for buildings and sidewalks and things like that issue get shadows trapped underneath the eyes and so that's something I'm willing to live with because there's ways to do that so it is in this case there is human even closer whoa oh sorry about that um I just want to diminish these kind of shadows underneath the eyes there's a few different strategies let me show you a couple in light room we'll see a few strengths and weaknesses your different approaches we could press the cuchi on we could say well what happens if we sort of like drag over this and you know canon patches over that we could try to clone it will see the edge he'll blends or color we could increase the feather and try to find a way to remove it I know this looks bad but the point I...
think of what we have here is sometimes you can use this technique even look so bad if you just bring it up you know, twenty percent right there let me show you my before and after is that look a little better natural normal human being I didn't ruin the image the problem that a lot of my students have is they'll do this and they'll forget about these other wrinkles because what happens with wrinkles is they get deeper and longer with time so a lot of good rita cher's will just shortened wrinkles and they'll just take a little bit of the intensity of them off and sometimes I find like the wrinkles you know might be my fault like it might be that it was it was that you know the way I was having the person standing so the light was getting caught inside of there on dh so I'm just trying to sort of take these guys back so that's that's one option you know it's not like the best but it's pretty quick and dirty and you can get in there sometimes with different things h shows me all the stuff I did I want to reset that to get rid of it another option is the adjustment brush adjustment rush shortcut keys the cakey so we select that one goto our pull down menu and choose exposure usually want to touch of exposure and a little bit of shadows and what we haven't talked about with this tool which I imagine you've heard before but I'll just say again is our controls brush size we we've already looked at bracket keys left and right um feather has to do with the edge we have no feather here goes the exaggeration if we have no feather we have really harsh edge if we have a lot of feather and we have a really soft edge and often when we're working on people we have a lot of feather because we want softness and blending and like to have a natural flow and then our flow is kind of like intensity we have a low flow let's say that's fifteen or something when I brush back and forth back and forth back and forth back and forth they build it up flow all the way up its boom there it isyou know full intensity so flow really gives you this ability to control how quickly the adjustment happens you control flow by your number keys just like in photo shop you know you think of a pastis really the the key factor and photoshopped so in light room its flow so numbers keys give us access to that so here what we would want is a nice little brush really nice little flow we're just going to try to kind of paint into those shadows and get some get some area into that the one thing we may need to do and let me lower my values there one thing we may need to do is modify color because whenever we brightened things become a little bit mohr orange yellow red and when we darken they become a little bit more black so whatever way you're going just know you may need to do that in this case I think if I added a little bit of diy saturation into that area it looks a ton more natural and I think what I need to do is to really exaggerate to make my point so pretend for a moment I'm building this up and I know that looks horrible if I drop my saturation down can you kind of see how I could find a place sit a little closer to the normal skin tone okay that looks horrible let's do it for real so for real exposure just a top shadows just a touch nice low flow amount pretty high feather and I'm just going to get into those shadows and what I'm looking to do is to paying out the brightness there I have a colleague who I talked with for years and he would teach retouching and the way he would teach it is burning and dodging and photo shop and that was all you could use and so the students became really good at frightening and dark and thinking about color and shadow this is hinting towards that it's no photo shop but sometimes you want to start here and other times you you'll go other places all right let's look at photos so delete that and go into photoshopped shortcut to go in photoshopped command e for edits and at this point to control yon windows this point is I see a lot of people working in labs what happens to them and photo shop workers they slump over and they get closer gotta keep your circulation going so roll your shoulders roll your ankles, stay alert alive take a breath, whatever you need to do to stay fired up and let's take a look at how we could work on this image lots of techniques we could use here let's review a short cut for a new layer shift command and gives me ability to name it. I'm gonna name it shadows shift control in on windows next up, I'll grab s for clones sam tool clone stamper just click on it up top brush have my values, your house can I access that dialogue? If I control, click on the image because you don't always want to go up there, right? Another way to get control that you want soft brushes, no hardness size you want it to be pretty small. All right, then opacity often when we're working with light, we start with low passes somewhere below fifty so even with the clone stamp tool or special, if the cologne sample I'm gonna drop maybe two thirty and you'll think you may think, chris, you've lost it, why would you use clone stamp tio to do this, my capacities to hae me drop it down and the reason why sometimes this works well when you're dealing with shadows is what you're doing is you're bringing in lighter values, but it has a little bit of texture to it, and so sometimes that can help you to kind of get a little bit of that value out so you can see where I'm going with it starting to get that out. I'm going a little bit quick and dirty here and I'm it's not quite as subtle and clean as I would like it, but I'm also having to do this so that you guys can see the difference if you would actually watch me retouch, you'd sit there and say that he didn't do anything on dh that's my indicator when when I'm realizing I am doing something, I'm I'm doing something wrong, so it should almost feel like have I done anything? Then you do before and after like a ho? Yeah that's good because nothing should stand out the whole point of retouching is that doesn't call attention to itself so I could save this image by lower my capacity and I'm reducing shadows I'm not obliterating them because I still need the shape to the face the eye still needs to have that I lead needs to have that shape that's one technique I want to do another one let's say with healing tool I want to create a new layer. I want to create it quick. You guys were getting a short cuts shift option command and ana max shipped all control. And, um, you guys like shortcuts? Yes. No, I like short cuts. I think because I like surfing and faster. I can get at this the fashion get off my mountain bike or getting the ocean or whatever it is there is advantage to speed and this tool, jakey, and then shift j toggles through these or just selected. This one is going to look kind of crazy at first. You know, when you when you you do healing, you're looking for really getting up to the edges and covering up kind of the shadow edges and dropping it out. And what you have to do is just let yourself kind of looked like you created a strange looking human without that shape that we're talking about knowing that essentially, what we're trying to do is what makeup artists do. What they do is work really orth contour highlights and shadows. And so we just put a ton of makeup on and makeup are still put a ton on, but then they work it out and are working it out really is just kind of fading it back. We're like, ok, well, this person, this maybe looks good right here. Once you have that value, then we can start hitting our other areas because we kind of know where we need to go. That one needs a little more. So you layer get a little bit more of that gonna watch all my wrinkles, and I'm speed retouching right now. But again, I'm trying to show technique. Great, and hopefully you guys are getting that little bit of some of that stuff, okay, so you can kind of see before and after, so we looked at different ways to do it. There's, some light room stuff, that's really important. Sometimes, that saves the day and it's all you need to do there's. Also, some photo shop.
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
brad in glenwood
Not sure where all the criticism is coming from. It is a good source for a basic workflow to create realistic portrait retouching. Probably not for the advanced Photoshop user, but I consider myself an intermediate and picked up some very good tips that I will consider and definitely add some to my workflow.I think Chris gave some good philosophy for retouching in the short amount of time. If you want a more involved course with more info then I would recommend Lindsay adler's portrait retouching, but even then her course is given over THREE days! In under 1.5 hours for this lecture, did you really expect more for $19-29? By the way if you look in the upper left hand corner of Lightroom it says Adobe PHOTOSHOP Lightroom, so if you want to be technical he was using Photoshop for all of his retouching! Would you have felt better if he was in Camera Raw? It's the same thing!
Rebecca George
Chris is an amazing teacher -- and he's all about efficiency, which I LOVE. He knows ALL the shortcuts and he's so skilled at smoothly working in repetition as he's teaching, so by the end of the class I found that I had effortlessly learned so many important shortcuts and had shifted my editing into warp speed! Such a great class, as are all his classes
grrjr
Lots of good information here. I just wish there would have been more of a walkthrough with the main image that is used for this lesson. It would be useful to see how he manipulated the color in the portrait of his friend for a beginner like me. I like the side by side comparison, but would like to know what else was changed in that photo besides getting rid of shine and softening skin.
Student Work
Related Classes
Portrait Photography