Edit spring portraits

Find out how to retouch your sunny-day images without taking up too much time

As nature starts to open up, it’s time to stretch out and do the things that warmer weather allows. If you’re a lover of portrait photography, the options at this time of year are just amazing. Bluebell woods, wild garlic and blooming hawthorn and elderberry offer wonderful settings for portraits.

It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting with natural light or using flash – what matters is utilising the location and editing to bring out the best in the photograph. As it happens, the shot above was lit using a big soft umbrella from camera left, but a diffuser blocking the sun, or a reflector bouncing light in, would have worked as well.

There’s always a fear that Lightroom isn’t sufficient for editing portraits, but in reality, it’s more than adequate for day-to-day editing requirements – not every portrait image needs to look like it could appear on the front cover of Vogue. Images like that can take days of high-end retouching, and when you’re doing a selection from a big shoot, that’s far too much time!

The plan should be to fix blemishes, even out the skin then add some finishing touches to give a final look.

1 Spot removal

No one has perfect skin, so begin with Spot Removal. It’s the plaster icon under the Histogram, which has the shortcut key ‘Q’. Set the Brush option to Heal, with Feather of 0 and Opacity of 100. Set Size to fit the blemish. Click on the more obvious spots to remove them. Draw along lines also as you require.

2 Smooth the skin

Next, smooth the skin. Click on the circle icon under the Histogram or press M. Choose the Brush option and paint on the skin. For ease, make sure Auto Mask is on and paint reasonably close to the skin. The Overlay colour has been changed to green by clicking the little swatch in Masking. Set Effect to Soft Skin (Lite).

3 Continue to refine

This can be refined further.

In the Masking panel, go to the Brush 1 mask, and click the ellipsis (the three dots).

In the menu, choose

‘Intersect Mask With…’ and then choose ‘Color Range’.

Draw out a rectangle on the cheek with the cursor, which has now changed to an eyedropper. Click Done to apply.

4 Tone Curve

For an effect, you can apply a Tone Curve. From the Tone Curve panel, click on the second option to use the Point Curve. Move the leftmost point up to fade the blacks. Next, add a point about 1/3 of the way up the line, dragging back to the centre line. Finally, click to add a final point about 1/3 from the top and drag up slightly.