Adobe Lightroom/ Classic

● $9.99/£9.98/month ● www.adobe.com

Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are not designed specifically for portrait enhancement, but the latest updates to the masking tools make them able to recognise and mask human faces and features automatically.

They do not offer the face-reshaping tools of other, dedicated portrait enhancement applications, or the clever digital makeup of PortraitPro 2023, but they do enable users to adjust facial skin tones, lip and eye colour, even beards. These tools may be more than enough for photographers who like to keep their portrait retouching as natural and as non-invasive as possible.

These portrait masking tools can be used manually or as part of Adobe’s Adaptive Presets. The walkthrough below show how these tools can be selected and used manually.

Lightroom does already come with a selection of portrait presets which are designed to give a variety of different image ‘looks’ while still preserving naturallooking portrait tones, but Adaptive Portrait Presets go further. These use the new AI-driven masking tools to identify and enhance specific facial features rather than the whole image.

Outside of its AI masking tools, Lightroom has other retouching tools that can help portrait photographers, in particular its Clone, Spot Removal and new Content-Aware Remove tools. These can be used to quickly fix blemishes and blot out unwanted background details.

Lightroom’s portrait enhancement tools are now so powerful and effective that many users might question the need for any dedicated portrait plug-ins or indeed Photoshop.