edit for impact

Make some quick and minimal edits to your portraits for a natural look

Creating a great portrait doesn’t stop after the image is taken; making some simple adjustments to your image in post-processing will help define and polish your shot.

I like to shoot the best image possible incamera. For me, retouching is about making the adjustments that couldn’t be made incamera, to tidy up details, remove distractions, correct colour or make final white balance adjustments. And importantly, do a realistic skin retouch; I don’t want my subject to look overly processed or fake, so the key is to do as little as possible while making the portrait as flattering as possible. How far you go with skin editing is down to your personal style, but can also be influenced by the expectations of your subject or client.

My rule of thumb for clearing up skin is that anything that is not permanent can be removed; spots, dry skin and blemishes go, but scars and freckles, for example, stay. Although, if there is anything that bothers your subject or is particularly distracting in appearance, this can be reduced in post without being altogether removed.

The portraits created using these techniques are lit mainly with natural light, and are, on the whole, relatively flat, with even exposures across the skin. This will make them easier to retouch, and a few simple steps in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop will give you a polished portrait.

Inset AUTUMNAL For this portrait, we only need to even a few areas of the skin and do a little bit of work with Photoshop’s healing Brush BEFORE AFTER SLIGHT TWEAKS as a general rule, portrait post-processing should be kept to a minimum in order to...