Enhance portraits with digital makeup

Use Lightroom to paint colour on your model’s lips and bring a new look to your studio shot

When we speak about Lightroom’s editing, we normally think about its limitations. Everything you do in Lightroom is writing an instruction that will be executed on Export: while you’re editing, you’re just looking at a preview of that as you edit. Photoshop, on the other hand, is directly manipulating the pixels in your photo. You can still do a lot more than you might expect in Lightroom, though.

For example, skin retouching and even batch skin retouching is possible for faster edits. And you might not know that you can do a reasonable job of adding false makeup to your photos, which is something you’d normally associate with Photoshop.

The classic makeup changes you could do include adding blush or eyeshadow; but here I’ll look at the lips. The tool of choice for this task is the Adjustment Brush, found at the end of the Tool Strip under the Histogram. You can also use the keyboard shortcut K to select the Adjustment Brush.