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8 Core Lightroom Retouching Techniques to Enhance Your Photos

31 May

The post 8 Core Lightroom Retouching Techniques to Enhance Your Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Darina Kopcok.

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Adobe Lightroom is the preferred RAW editor for many photographers. It’s user friendly, yet has many powerful features to help you get the most out of your photos. Here are the core Lightroom retouching techniques to get more out of your photographs.

1. Start with your histogram

The histogram is the first step in retouching using Lightroom. It mathematically represents the tonal range of a given photograph. The tonal range considers all the tones between the darkest part and the lightest part of your image.

The histogram maps out the brightness area in the photo in grayscale. Black is situated on the left side of the histogram, while white is on the right. You can find all the shades of grey in between. Every shade has a scale of brightness values. For a standard JPG image, there are 256 different recorded values of brightness, “0” being pure black and “255” pure white.

Learning how to read your histogram is important because it will tell you whether your photo is properly exposed or not. If you have pixels touching the very ends of your histogram, your photo is either underexposed or overexposed

Unfortunately, you can’t recover these missing details with Lightroom retouching techniques.

2. Choose the correct Color Profile

Before you start the retouching process, you should decide on a color profile, as it will make a significant difference in the color and contrast in your photo.

You can find the Color Profiles in the Basic panel. You can choose from Adobe profiles or from color profiles from your camera.

3. Get a base with the Tone Curve

Before making exposure adjustments in the Basic panel, it’s a good idea to get a base with the Tone Curve.

The Tone Curve is a graphical representation of the tones found throughout your image. By making tweaks to the curve, you can influence the look of the shadows and highlights.

I recommend starting by lifting the curve at the midpoint when in the Point Curve. This will boost the midtones and contrast, which looks attractive in most images.

Pull the curve down in the bottom quarter of the curve to deepen the shadows. These simple tweaks can make your image immediately look more dynamic.

If you’re new to the Tone Curve, you might be more comfortable starting with the sliders in the Region Curve. This won’t give you as much control as the Point Curve but will help you make significant changes to the aesthetic of your image.

Once you’ve made other edits to your image, you can come back to the Tone Curve for further tweaks.

Retouching is a process of building and assessing, so you’ll most likely have to jump around from one panel in Lightroom to another until you get a look that you’re satisfied with.

4. Tweak the Basic Panel

The next step is to correct your White Balance.

Keep in mind that White Balance can be set in-camera to be 100% accurate, or can be used creatively if you’re not striving for a correct white. For example, if your style is warmer in tone, you can push your white balance above 6000+ to give it a golden look.

I kept my image on the cooler side because I wanted to bring out the blue and emphasize the complementary color choice to make my apricots pop.

Once you’ve made the best white balance, make any necessary edits to the Highlights, Shadows, and Whites and Blacks in the Basic Panel.

If your image doesn’t look correctly exposed in these areas, you can then adjust the exposure. However, I don’t recommend starting there. It’ll boost the exposure in all those areas, which may not be what the image needs.

5. Layer Contrast and add Vibrance in the Presence Panel

When retouching in Lightroom, I recommend using the Vibrance slider instead of Saturation.

Vibrance lifts the mid-tones. Saturation boosts all the color in the image, which can make it look unnatural and clownish. If you do choose to use the Saturation slider, watch how it affects your picture as you move the slider. A maximum of +10 is usually more than enough.

Be sure to add a bit of Clarity, which will boost the contrast in the image. The best retouching is often the result of layering various effects at low numbers, rather than adding a high amount of any one tool, such as Contrast.

To create contrast, you can use a combination of Contrast, Clarity, Texture, and the Tone Curve. Even a touch of Dehaze works great for a lot of images.

6. Adjust color in the HSL Panel

Color has a huge impact on your image. Color is an aspect of composition and crucial to the aesthetic of your photography. The HSL panel in Lightroom is where you will do the most color treatment.

Unless your aesthetic is quite warm, you might want to bring the orange saturation down a bit in your photos. It tends to look too strong. Also, pay attention to the Luminance sliders and use them instead of Saturation to control brightness, as they control the brightness of individual colors.

7. Try Split Toning in the highlights and shadows

Split Toning is a Lightroom tool that you can use to great effect when it comes to Lightroom retouching techniques. Split Toning adds color toning to the highlights and shadows individually, based on luminance.

However, note that a little goes a long way.

To add split toning, hold down the Alt/Option key while you move the sliders for Highlights and Shadows. This will allow you to see the variations for each color and pre-visualize how it will look applied to the image.

Dial-in as much saturation as you feel appropriate for the image. This is usually a low number. A small amount is often all you need to make your images more dynamic.

Split-toning is sometimes overlooked or used with too heavy of a hand, but with a subtle approach, it’s a very effective Lightroom retouching technique.

8. Enhance with local adjustments

Local adjustments are applied to a localized area in an image rather than globally. They only affect the part of the image selected. This allows you to fine tune your photo and have more control over your final result. You can use them to correct problem areas or to create a certain effect.

The local adjustment tools are:

the Graduated Filter

8 Core Lightroom Retouching Techniques to Enhance Your Photos

The Graduated Filter is for filtered effects and creating evenness throughout the image.

the Radial Filter

The Radial Filter helps you easily isolate subjects for retouching.

the Adjustment Brush

The Adjustment Brush helps you create masks for localized retouching by brushing them on.

the Spot Removal tool

The Spot Removal tool gets rid of blemishes or small objects in the image. The Adjustment Brush is for creating free-form masks, while the Radial Filter is used to isolate subjects.

Range masks have been added to three of the local adjustment tools to allow you to target color and luminance.

The key to enhancing your images with local adjustments is to use a combination of the tools for subtle adjustments, as well as adjusting the opacity or feathering of the tool to create subtle transitions.

Using local adjustments is one of the most powerful Lightroom retouching techniques.

Conclusion

You’ll get the best result in Lightroom by layering the different tools. For example, don’t just use the Contrast slider to add contrast and call it a day. Layer the contrast with small adjustments to the Tone Curve, Dehaze, and Clarity for a subtle and effective look.

Every photographer develops a workflow that works effectively for them. Hopefully, these core Lightroom retouching techniques will help you fine-tune your editing process.

If you have any other Lightroom retouching techniques you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section.

The post 8 Core Lightroom Retouching Techniques to Enhance Your Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Darina Kopcok.

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Tips for Retouching Skin in Photoshop That You Need to Know

16 Feb

The post Tips for Retouching Skin in Photoshop That You Need to Know appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by John McIntire.

When it comes to retouching skin in Photoshop, there are a lot of tools and techniques available to you. Some of these are fairly easy and self-explanatory, like the Healing Brush. Others, like frequency separation, are complicated multi-step processes. They involve such obscure features of Photoshop that you would never be able to figure it out on your own. Many of the skin retouching techniques are useful and work well when used together with one another.

This article will provide you a set of tips to get the most out of some of the most common and most useful (read: my opinion) of these techniques. It assumes you have a basic understanding of how to use them. If you don’t, there are a myriad of good quality tutorials available.

Tips for retouching skin in Photoshop.

Tutorials

Here’s a short list of tutorials for all of the techniques listed in this article:

Healing Brush
Patch Tool
Clone Stamp
Frequency Separation
Dodging and Burning

Healing Brush

The Healing Brush is probably going to be the first thing you reach for when you are retouching skin in Photoshop. It’s a somewhat intuitive tool, that doesn’t take that long to figure out and it is very effective at what it does.

To get the very best results from using the healing brush:

1. Work on a new layer

When working with the healing brush, be sure to work on a new blank layer. That way, you can be sure that you are not altering your original image. This also allows you to make changes later.

To do this, press the New Layer button on the Layers palette or press Ctrl+Shift+n (Cmd+Shift+n Mac). With the new layer set up, be sure that the drop-down box for the Healing Brush labeled “sample” is set to Current and Below.

Using the healing brush for retouching skin in Photoshop.

Working on a blank layer will ensure you can undo any changes you make should you decide to later.

2. Use as small of a brush as possible

You can quickly change your brush size with the bracket keys ( { and } ). Try to keep the brush just big enough to cover only the blemish that you are trying to remove.

Image: For the best results, use a brush size that is just bigger than the blemish you are trying to...

For the best results, use a brush size that is just bigger than the blemish you are trying to remove. This ensures that you don’t make too many alterations to the natural pattern of the skin.

3. Sample often

Don’t make a sample selection just once – do it often. Do it between every blemish if you can. This may seem like a lot of effort, but with practice, it’s really not. Your images will be better for it too.

4. Zoom in

To make sure that you are only trying to heal blemishes, and not the area of skin around them, zoom in as far as you need to.

I understand some photographer’s reticence to zoom in to 400% to 500% for the sake of retouching, but doing so will make sure that you only affect the areas of your subject’s skin that need it.

This tip (and the next one) doesn’t just apply to the Healing Brush. Do this with every skin retouching technique listed here.

Image: Zooming in allows you to be more precise with your adjustments and leads to more natural-look...

Zooming in allows you to be more precise with your adjustments and leads to more natural-looking results.

5. Zoom back out

When you are very zoomed in on your subject, you can get lost in all of the details that you can now see. Make it a point to zoom back out frequently so you can make sure that the changes you are making are actually affecting what you can see on the image at 100%. This can save you hours.

6. Don’t paint

Instead of painting with the Healing Brush, just press once (or click with a mouse) over the blemish you are trying to remove. This will limit the alterations to the surrounding skin.

Using the healing brush for skin retouching in Photoshop.

Painting with the healing brush leads to weird artifacts. To avoid these, simply click on the blemish you want to remove and nothing more.

Patch tool

The patch tool is a powerful utility that allows you to select an area that you want to retouch with a lasso and then drag that over to a sample area that you want to use to fill that first area in. It’s fairly easy to use, but it can be tricky at first.

1. Work on a new layer

You can use a copy of your background layer.

If you’ve already created and worked on a few layers at this stage, you can press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E (Cmd+Alt+Shift+E – Mac) to create a new layer with all of those adjustments merged into it.

This will allow you to reduce the opacity of what you’ve done with the patch tool in case you go too far. It will also make it easy to delete the layer and start from scratch if need be.

Image: The patch tool can’t be used with an empty layer. Instead, duplicate your background la...

The patch tool can’t be used with an empty layer. Instead, duplicate your background layer and work on the copy. If you’re later on in your workflow, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+e (Cmd+Alt+Shift+e) to stamp all existing layers into a new one above the rest.

2. Avoid the content-aware fill

In terms of skin, the Content-Aware Patch Tool never seems to perform very well. Instead, leave the mode set to normal and use the Patch Tool that way. For things like backgrounds, by all means, use content-aware; just avoid it for skin retouching.

Image: Content-aware fill, as it works with the Patch Tool, is great for many things, but skin is no...

Content-aware fill, as it works with the Patch Tool, is great for many things, but skin is not one of them. Although this was sampled from a very similar part of his face, content-aware has made a mess of it.

3. Patch small areas

It’s tempting to just select a large area of skin and try to work that way. However, this will only serve to create a bunch of artifacts on your subject’s skin. Keeping your selections small allows you more control over the end result and will result in fewer problems down the line.

4. Use similar tonal areas

When possible, use a sample area that’s similar in tone to your selection area. This will reduce the chances of creating problematic artifacts and blur.

Using the patch tool for skin retouching in Photoshop.

Here, you can see the various areas of similar tonality circled in red. When using the Patch Tool, try to sample from similar areas of tonality.

5. Reduce opacity

Once you’ve done the work that you want to with the patch tool, feel free to reduce the opacity of the layer that you are working on. This can help to hide a heavy handed approach and help to give more natural looking results. This tip applies to pretty much every other skin retouching technique as well.

Clone stamp

When you are retouching skin in Photoshop, the clone stamp tool will probably be one of your least used tools. It’s tricky to use and it’s often easier and faster to get similar results with other techniques. The one notable exception is when you are using frequency separation (covered below).

1. Use a soft brush

This may be a preference, but the Clone Stamp is a heavy-handed tool that makes drastic changes with a single click. By using a soft-edged brush, you will reduce the impact of the area of skin around the blemish you are removing.

To get to your brush menu, just right-click.

Image: This may be preference, but for the most part, you will want to use the softest brush possibl...

This may be preference, but for the most part, you will want to use the softest brush possible when using the Clone Stamp. The Clone Stamp is a very aggressive tool that can affect skin patterns in an undesirable way if used without care.

2. Do not paint

As with the Healing Brush, do your best not to paint an area of skin with the Clone Stamp. Try to keep the affected area limited to an individual blemish, pore or other marks.

Using the clone stamp for retouching skin in Photoshop.

Even though the sampled area was identical in tone, you can see the results of painting with the clone stamp tool in one large stroke.

3. Use sparingly

Again this may be personal preference talking, but try to resort to the Clone Stamp when it’s the only tool left for the job, at least in terms of skin retouching. The problems this tool can create with odd aberrations in skin texture patterns are hardly worth the risk.

Frequency Separation

Frequency Separation is one of those techniques that appears as overcomplicated sorcery at first glance. Once you’ve learned the fundamentals of the technique and how to set it up, it’s actually quite easy. It’s also a very powerful technique that can transform your skin retouching workflow. It is; however, very easy to go overboard with this technique and a heavy hand will result in less than ideal results. Once you’ve got the implementation and the basics of frequency separation down, there are a few tips to help you get the best results.

1. Gaussian Blur settings

When setting up your frequency separation layers, keep the Gaussian Blur settings to the lowest possible number while it is still obscuring all of the detail in your subject’s skin.

“4” is a good number to start with, but it might vary depending on the resolution you’re working with and how much of the frame your subject’s face fills.

Image: When setting up your Low-Frequency layer, use just enough blur to remove all of the skin text...

When setting up your Low-Frequency layer, use just enough blur to remove all of the skin texture in that layer. Here, Gaussian Blur was set to 2.

2. Blur

When applying Gaussian Blur to your Low-Frequency layer, keep the amount of blur to either equal or less than the amount that you used when setting up the layer in the first place.

3. Blur – Tones

Only blur areas of skin that are a similar tone. Blurring midtones and highlights (or shadows and midtones, or any other combination) can result in muddied tones that often don’t look good. Keep your selections to areas of similar tonality to avoid these muddied tones.

Using frequency separation for skin retouching in Photoshop.

When applying blur to sections of your Low-Frequency layer, try to make your selections in areas of similar tones. This will still help to smooth the tonal transitions without muddying them.

4. Zoom in

Ensure that you are zooming in to at least 100% on your images to watch for any hard edges that may appear while applying blur.

This can happen as you get close to hard edges within your frames, such as lips and eyes. If they do start appearing, you can reduce the amount of blur you are using, or you can make a new selection farther away from the areas causing you trouble.

5. Clone Stamp

For the High-Frequency layer, you just need to be careful with how you use the Clone Stamp. As above, the Clone Stamp is best used on very small areas with a single click. Sample often and don’t paint with it and you should be fine.

Dodging and Burning

Probably the most powerful and versatile of the techniques listed in this article, Dodging and Burning might as well be considered an essential tool for anyone that expects to be doing a lot of skin retouching. There are a lot of ways to do dodging and burning, but for the sake of these tips, I am going to refer to the method that involves using a 50% gray layer set to Overlay that you then paint on with the brush tool with white to lighten the tones and with black to darken them.

1. Keep the brush flow at 1%

Like all skin retouching techniques, subtlety is the key, and with the brushes flow at 1%, you can slowly build up any alterations that you are making.

Dodging and burning for skin retouching in Photoshop.

When dodging and burning on a grey layer, set the flow of your brush to 1%. This will allow you to build strokes slowly for more natural results.

Using dodging and burning for skin retouching in Photoshop

Circled at the top: The flow for the brush was set to 10%. Circled at the bottom: The flow here was 1% You can see the drastic difference just 9% makes on the flow settings.

2. Try to avoid broad strokes

Instead of trying to alter large aspects of your image at one time (for example, lightening an entire forehead in one go), zoom in on the area you want to work on and work on areas of a similar tone. By working with smaller areas, you will get more natural results.

3. Use multiple layers

If you are using broad strokes and working on finer detail with dodging and burning in the same image, do both of these on separate layers. Dedicate one to each layer.

With the large brush strokes, you will likely be more concentrated on overall contrast. You will often want to use a Gaussian blur on your brush strokes to even them out too.

This is not the case with fine detail where your brushstrokes should only deal with tiny, precise areas.

For very fine control over your image, use a different layer for dodging and burning all of the sections of your image. This will allow you to alter, or get rid of any changes you might change your mind about later on without undoing all of your work elsewhere.

4. Use a small brush

Skin has a lot of fine detail in which the light in your scene passes over and creates contrast. It’s this contrast on the skin that creates the appearance of blemishes in your photos.

Because these blemishes are often small, you want to try and use a brush that is at least as small as the area you are working to lighten and darken with dodging and burning. This will ensure that you are lowering the contrast – therefore lowering the visibility of the blemishes – rather than adding it where you don’t want to.

5. Use Ctrl+z (Cmd+z) often

When you’re using a technique like dodging and burning for retouching skin in Photoshop, you are using a lot of little adjustments, maybe even thousands of them, to build up to a finished result. You will get some of these wrong. Don’t be afraid to undo anything you’ve done if it isn’t right.

6. Reduce the Layer Opacity

Once you’ve done any adjustments that you are going to make with dodging and burning, try reducing the opacity of the layer(s) to see if you can get a better result with less of an effect.

With a time-consuming technique like this, it is easy to get lost in it and go overboard. Sometimes reducing the effect at the end is just what is needed for a more natural result.

When you’re finished with your dodging and burning, you can always turn the opacity of the layer down to see if you might have gone too far. It’s a good idea to always at least look, even if you don’t decide to lower the opacity in the end.

7. Zoom way in

Unless your image will never be printed and only viewed in a small resolution, zoom as far into your images as you dare while retouching skin in Photoshop (this applies to all of the techniques here) to achieve the absolute best results.

Sometimes, you will find that you need to be zoomed in at 300-500% to see all of the detail that you need to work with. Sure, working this way takes a lot longer and is intimidating to think about, but putting that amount of effort in will help you to achieve better results.

The end

There are, of course, many other techniques available for retouching skin in Photoshop, but these are the ones that I use the most often.

If you’re new to these techniques, you now (hopefully) have a few tips to help you figure out how to make the very most out of them.

Of course, with techniques like these, there are always more ways to do things. If you have any tips of your own on retouching skin in Photoshop, please feel free to share them below.

The post Tips for Retouching Skin in Photoshop That You Need to Know appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by John McIntire.

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PhotoWorks: Photo Retouching Will Never Be Tedious Again

01 Oct

Retouching photos could be a nightmare. Wrinkles, acne, oily skin – sometimes the camera is cruelly precise. It is unpleasant to say the least if those are just your own private pictures. But what if photography is your business? No client wants to see their faces imperfect, especially on pictures taken during a special event (wedding, anniversary, etc.). If you Continue Reading

The post PhotoWorks: Photo Retouching Will Never Be Tedious Again appeared first on Photodoto.

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Basic Photo Retouching in GIMP

25 Jul

The post Basic Photo Retouching in GIMP appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ana Mireles.

Do you feel your photos are good but not great? Do you think something is missing in your images? You may just need a little post-production to give your images the punch they need to become eye-catching. Keep reading to learn some basic photo retouching in GIMP – a free software – that will make your photos pop.

Basic Photo Retouching in GIMP

GIMP is an image manipulation software you can download for free. If you’re not familiar with it, check my previous article, A Brief Introduction to GIMP. There are many things you can do with it. To start you up, I decided to do a quick overview of the most common adjustments for photo editing.

Rotate

Most times you take a photograph without a tripod, you’re bound to have the horizon line leaning towards one side. You can easily fix this common problem by using the rotation tool. First, you may want to turn on the visibility of the grid. For this go to View -> Show Grid. If you want to make it wider or narrower, go to Image -> Configure Grid.

GIMP. Configure the grid

Now, to straighten the image, click on the rotation button from the toolbox to open the tool’s setting window. Then you can either drag the slider or type the degree of the angle you want. The last two options are there to re-position the rotation center point if you want. You can also do this by dragging the image itself.

Basic Photo Retouching in Gimp. Rotate Tool

Crop

After the rotation or other transforming methods like perspective, some parts of the canvas remain empty, and you need to crop them out. For this, click the Crop tool from the toolbox and drag around the part you want to keep. The part that will be cropped out becomes shaded. To fine-tune the selection click, and drag the edges. When you’re satisfied click on the image to apply the crop.

Crop Tool

To keep an eye on the composition while cropping, you can put some guides to use as points of reference. For example, to play with symmetry put a guideline at 50%. Alternatively, put one at 33% and another at 66% if you want to follow the rule of thirds. You can do this by right-clicking the image window to open the main menu. From there, you need to go to Image -> Guides -> New Guide by percent.

Guides by Percent

Layers

For retouching, it’s always best to work on layers. That way, you can always go back if you don’t like how things are going. First, make sure the layers dock is visible. If it’s not, open it from Windows -> Dockables.

From there you can add a new empty layer from the blank page icon. Duplicate the current layer with the symbol of 2 squares, or delete it by dragging it into the paper shredder one.

Basic Photo Retouching. Create and manage layers

By the way, if you don’t want to cancel the entire process you’ve done on a layer, you can go to the tab, Undo, and do it step by step. The Undo tab keeps a history dialogue allocated as a dock containing your latest actions. If the dock is not there, you can open it from Windows -> Dockables.

Basic Photo Retouching. Undo

Color Adjustments

If your image is not well exposed, you can find the Adjustment tools to fix it in the Color menu. To access it, right-click on the image window and choose Colors. Then choose the tool that best suits the adjustment you need to do. To see these options more in-depth check the article Make your Photos Sparkle with GIMP. For now, I’ll just show you the Levels tool, which I find to be one of the most versatile.

Basic Photo Retouching in GIMP. Color Adjustment tools

Levels

With Levels, you can fix the color balance and tonal range of your image. GIMP gives you different choices to modify the Levels from the same window. You can move the sliders, enter the values underneath, use the eyedroppers to set the brightest, darkest and middle tones, and even use the auto-mode. They all make similar changes, but they can be more or less precise.

Remember to have the preview box checked so you can see the changes take effect before you apply them.

Basic Photo Retouching. Levels

Filters

You can also apply a great variety of filters; from correcting ones like sharpening an image, to special ones like coffee stains. You can find all these options in the Main Menu -> Filters.

Feel free to experiment with them.

Basic Photo Retouching in GIMP using filters

Finally, you can switch to the Multiple Windows Mode (in case you weren’t using it) by going to the menu Windows -> Single Window Mode and uncheck it. Then open the original file and a second window will open with the image so you can compare the side-by-side before and after images.

GIMP. Before and After

I hope you learned some useful tips to fix or boost your images.

If you’re interested in doing some more in-depth work on GIMP Check out the tutorials:

How to Replace a Sky in GIMP
Content-Aware Resizing in GIMP

Have you used GIMP? What are your thoughts? Do you have any other tips to share in the comments? We’d love to hear from you.

The post Basic Photo Retouching in GIMP appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ana Mireles.

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Understanding Imaging Techniques: the Difference Between Retouching, Manipulating, and Optimizing Images

09 Mar

The post Understanding Imaging Techniques: the Difference Between Retouching, Manipulating, and Optimizing Images appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Herb Paynter.

Understanding Imaging Techniques

Three distinct post-production processes alter the appearance of digital photographs: Retouching, Manipulating, and Optimizing. These terms may sound similar enough to be synonymous at first glance, but they are entirely different operations. Once you understand the difference between these three processes, your image editing will take on new meaning, and your images will deliver powerful results.

Image retouching

Photo retouching is image alteration that intends to correct elements of the photograph that the photographer doesn’t want to appear in the final product. This includes removing clutter from the foreground or background and correcting the color of specific areas or items (clothing, skies, etc.). Retouching operations make full use of cloning and “healing” tools in an attempt to idealize real life. Unfortunately, most retouching becomes necessary because we don’t have (or take) the time to plan out our shots.

Our brain tends to dismiss glare from our eyes, but the camera sees it all. A slight change of elevation and a little forethought can save a lot of editing time.

Planning a shot in advance will alleviate much of these damage control measures but involves a certain amount of pre-viewing; scouting out the area and cleaning up items before the camera captures them. This includes “policing” of the area… cleaning mirrors and windows of fingerprints, dusting off surfaces, and general housekeeping chores. This also includes putting things away (or in place), previewing and arranging the lighting available and supplementing the lighting with flash units and reflectors where required, checking for reflections, etc.

Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” which pretty much sums up the cleanup chores. We also use the phrase “preventative maintenance;” fixing things before they break and need repair.

Admittedly, we don’t often have the luxury of time required to primp and polish a scene before we capture it, and retouching is our only option. However, sometimes all we need to do is evaluate the scene, move around and see the scene from another angle, or wait for the distraction to move out of the scene.

Sometimes a small reposition can lessen the amount of touchup and repair needed.

We can’t always avoid chaos, but we could limit the retouching chore with a little forethought. It takes just a fraction of a second to capture an image, but it can take minutes-to-hours to correct problems captured.

Image manipulation

Manipulation is a bit different, though it occasionally is a compounded chore with retouching. When we manipulate a photo, we truly step out of reality and into fantasyland. When we manipulate an image we override reality and get creative; moving, adding elements to a scene or changing the size and dimension. When we manipulate an image, we become a “creator” rather than simply an observer of a scene. This is quite appropriate when creating “art” from a captured image, and is ideal for illustrations but perhaps shouldn’t be used as a regular post-capture routine.

Photo-illustration is an excellent use of serious manipulation, and can be quite effective for conveying abstract concepts and illustrations.

Earlier in my career, I worked as a photoengraver in a large trade shop in Nashville Tennessee during the early days of digital image manipulation. The shop handled the pre-press chores for many national accounts and international publications. On one occasion in 1979, we were producing a cover for one of these magazines. On the cover was a picture of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat set against one of the great pyramids. Unfortunately, the pyramid was in a position that interfered with the titles on the magazine’s cover.

While this is not the exact picture used in the magazine, you see the challenge.

The Art Director for the magazine sent instructions for us to shift the pyramid in the picture so that the titles would not interfere with it. Moving that thing was an amazing feat back then. Normal airbrushing would have left obvious evidence of visual trickery, but digital manipulation opened a whole new potential for near-perfect deception. We were amazed at the potential but a bit nervous about the moral implications of using this power.

This venture was accomplished (over a decade before Photoshop) on an editing machine called a SciTex Response, a workstation supported by a very powerful minicomputer. Nobody outside that small building knew that from Nashville, we pushed an Egyptian pyramid across the desert floor until revealed years later. Shortly thereafter, digitally altered images were prohibited from use as evidence in a court of law by the Supreme Court of the United States. Today, this level of manipulation lets you routinely alter reality and play god on a laptop, sitting on a park bench.

Manipulation is powerful stuff and should be used with serious restraint; not so much for legal reasons, but because of diminishing regard for nature and reality. Fantasyland is fun, but reality is where we live. We quite regularly mask skies and replace boring clouds with blue skies and dramatic clouds, and even sunsets – all without hesitation. We can move people around a scene and clone them with ease using popular photo editing software. Reality has become anything but reality. Photo contests prohibit photo manipulation in certain categories, though a skillful operator can cover their digital tracks and fool the general public. However, savvy judges can always tell the difference.

Typical manipulation consisting of a clouded sky to replay lost detail.

Personal recommendation: keep the tricks and photo optics to a minimum. Incorporating someone else’s pre-set formulas and interpretation into your photos usually compromises your personal artistic abilities. Don’t define your style by filtering your image through someone else’s interpretation. Be the artist, not the template. Take your images off the assembly line and deal with them individually.

Image optimization

Photo optimization is an entirely different kind of editing altogether and the one that I use in my professional career. I optimize photos for several City Magazines in South Florida. Preparing images for the printed page isn’t the same as preparing them for inkjet printing. Printing technology uses totally different inks, transfer systems, papers, and production speeds than inkjet printers. Each process requires a different distribution of tones and colors.

Since my early days in photoengraving, I’ve sought to squeeze every pixel for all the clarity and definition it can deliver. The first rule (of my personal discipline) is to perform only global tonal and color adjustments. Rarely should you have to rely on pixel editing to reveal the beauty and dynamic of a scene. Digital photography is all about light. Think of light as your paintbrush and the camera as nothing more than the canvas that your image is painted on. Learn to control light during the capture and your post-production chores will diminish significantly. Dodging, burning and other local editing should be required rarely, if at all.

Both internal contrast and color intensity (saturation) were adjusted to uncover lost detail.

Even the very best digital camera image sensors cannot discern what is “important” information within each image’s tonal range. The camera’s sensors capture an amazing range of light from the lightest and the darkest areas of an image, but all cameras lack the critical element of artistic judgment concerning the internal contrast of that light range.

If you capture your images in RAW format, all that amazing range packed into each 12-bit image (68,000,000,000 shade values between the darkest pixel and the lightest) can be interpreted, articulated, and distributed to unveil the critical detail hiding between the shadows and the highlights. I’ve edited tens of thousands of images over my career, and very few cannot reveal additional detail with just a little investigation. There are five distinct tonal zones (highlight, quarter-tones, middle-tones, three-quarter-tones, and shadows) in every image, and each can be individually pushed, pulled, and contorted to reveal the detail contained therein. While a printed image is always distilled down to 256 tones per color, this editing process lets you, the artist, decide how the image is interpreted.

Shadow (dark) tones quite easily lose their detail and print too dark if not lightened selectively by internal contrast adjustment. The Shadows slider (Camera Raw and Lightroom) was lightened.

The real artistry of editing images is not accomplished by the imagination, but rather by investigation and discernment. No amount of image embellishment can come close to the beauty that is revealed by merely uncovering reality. The reason most photos don’t show the full dynamic of natural light is that the human eye can interpret detail in a scene while the camera can only record the overall dynamic range. Only when we (photographers/editors/image-optimizers) take the time to uncover the power and beauty woven into each image can we come close to producing what our eyes and our brain’s visual cortex experience all day, every day.

Personal Challenge

Strive to extract the existing detail in your images more than you paint over and repair the initial appearance. There is usually amazing detail hiding there just below the surface. After you capture all the potential range with your camera capture (balancing your camera’s exposure between the navigational beacons of your camera’s histogram), you must then go on an expedition to explore everything that your camera has captured. Your job is to discover the detail, distribute the detail, and display that detail to the rest of us.

Happy hunting.

The post Understanding Imaging Techniques: the Difference Between Retouching, Manipulating, and Optimizing Images appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Herb Paynter.

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Five Common Portrait Retouching Mistakes to Avoid

01 Apr

When it comes to retouching portraits there are a number of mistakes that I see photographers make over and over. Part of the problem is that there are too many poorly made skin smoothing plugins. Another is that Photoshop gives you too many options for portrait retouching. There is a simple solution for this which I’ll mention at the end of the article.

In the meantime, let’s look at the most common portrait retouching mistakes photographers make so you can avoid them. Don’t feel too bad if you are making any of these errors. Consider it part of the learning process. You’ll learn to avoid these mistakes as your retouching skills improve.

Portrait retouching mistakes

1. Applying too much skin smoothing

This is a problem you see in commercial photography as well as in the work of hobbyist photographers. If you look closely at a typical cinema photo or a perfume advertisement you’ll see that the models and actors are often retouched to the point they are nearly unrecognizable. They certainly don’t look real or authentic. When this happens in the commercial world it’s little wonder that other photographers imitate what they see and make the same mistakes.

My advice is to consider whether skin smoothing is required in the first place and if it is to apply it with the lightest possible touch. Most photos of men don’t require skin smoothing. It’s conventional to apply some skin smoothing with most portraits of women, but it’s also important to retain skin texture to avoid the plastic skin look.

Two versions of the same portrait. The one on the left has had too much skin smoothing applied. The one on the right has less skin smoothing. You can still see skin texture and the result looks more natural.

The best way to apply skin smoothing that I know of is to use the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom with the Soften Skin preset (this preset comes with Lightroom and affects the Clarity and Sharpness sliders).

Portrait retouching mistakes

When you first apply the preset you’ll see that it’s very strong and as a result the effect is overdone. But you can get around that easily by clicking the black triangle above the Adjustment Brush sliders (below).

Portrait retouching mistakes

When you do so the sliders disappear and are replaced by a single Amount slider. You can set it anywhere from 100 (full effect) to zero (no effect). This lets you apply the skin smoothing effect with a light touch that retains skin texture.

Portrait retouching mistakes

2. Making the model’s eyes bigger

Amongst some photographers, it has become trendy to use Photoshop’s Liquify tool to make the model’s eyes bigger. The idea behind it is simple – large eyes are considered appealing, and enlarging a model’s eyes makes her more attractive.

Where this theory falls down is that most people are smart enough to recognize when this has been done, especially if they know the model personally. It results in an unnatural looking portrait that has lost any authenticity.

Portrait retouching mistakes

3. Making the model’s eyes too bright or too sharp

One of biggest advantages that software like Lightroom and Photoshop has given photographers is the ability to make highly accurate local adjustments. But it’s so easy to make the model’s eyes whiter, brighter or sharper that many photographers do so without thinking about whether or not it looks natural.

A better approach is to apply the effect subtly and zoom into 100% to check that it looks realistic. Go too far and you end up with a portrait where the model’s eyes attract attention for the wrong reason – they are over-processed rather than being the windows into the person’s soul.

portait retouching mistakes

4. Applying too much Clarity

Even professional photographers make this mistake. Recently I saw a friend’s wedding photos and my first thought was that the photographer had applied way too much Clarity, making her look older than she really is. Of course, I didn’t say anything as I didn’t want to spoil her enjoyment of her big day or the wedding photos. But if the photographer had photographed my wedding I would have been very disappointed with the results.

Adding Clarity emphasizes skin texture, blemishes, and wrinkles. For this reason, it’s usually a bad idea to apply it to portraits of women. Normally you do the opposite and apply skin smoothing (which is a negative Clarity adjustment in Lightroom).

With men it’s different. You may want to apply Clarity in order to emphasize skin texture and make the model’s face appear more rugged. You have to judge it on a case by case basis as every portrait is different.

The key, once again, is to apply it subtly rather than with a heavy hand. Your processing technique shouldn’t draw attention to itself.

5. Over-sharpening

This is another big mistake that I see photographers make. Over sharpening can come from several sources. For example, if you use the JPEG format rather than Raw then remember that your camera sharpens the photo for you. Any sharpening you apply in post-processing is applied on top of an already sharpened photo.

If you use Raw there is very little need to set Sharpening to anything other than the default settings in your Raw converter. It’s rare that any additional sharpening is required on top of that. Remember that the effect of Sharpening is heightened if used in conjunction with applying Clarity.

The best approach to Sharpening is to use your software’s default settings and to never apply any additional Sharpening on top of that. If you do apply extra Sharpening, you need to zoom into your portrait to check the effect on the eyes and eyelashes, as this is where artifacts caused by over-sharpening are most likely to appear.

Note: Remember to use the mask feature of the sharpening tools in LR and ACR. That will help keep the sharpening to only edges and not smooth areas like skin or sky.

Conclusion

Another aspect we haven’t discussed yet is to think about exactly what you want to achieve with your portrait processing. For example, you have probably guessed by now that I favor a natural, authentic approach to portraiture. That means using natural light, prime lenses, wide apertures and minimal processing. These techniques help me achieve the look I’m after.

Other photographers may be more commercially minded. If this is you, then a slightly more heavy-handed approach may be required. Even so, it’s wise to apply skin smoothing and other portrait retouching techniques subtly, rather than over-process your portraits.

At the beginning of the article, I mentioned a simple solution to the problem of over-processing portraits. The solution is this – use Lightroom. Don’t use Photoshop and don’t use a portrait retouching plugin.

There is no Liquify tool in Lightroom so you won’t be tempted to change the shape of a model’s eyes or face. There’s only one skin smoothing preset, so you should be able to avoid the temptation to over smooth the model’s skin. There is no high pass filter or other fancy sharpening techniques, so this should prevent you from over sharpening your portraits (be careful with the Clarity slider though!).

What are the most common portrait retouching mistakes you’ve seen or made yourself? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

23 Dec

Here are five quick tips for doing retouching in Photoshop that are essential to know. Learn them to do better retouching on your photos.

#1 – Load Luminosity as a Selection

In Photoshop you can use the luminosity of an image (the bright pixels) as selections. The easiest way to make a selection out of the bright pixels of a photo is by pressing Command+Option+2, (Windows: Ctrl+Alt+2).

If you cannot remember the keyboard shortcut, you can also load luminosity as a selection by holding Cmd/Ctrl and clicking on the RGB thumbnail in the Channels panel.

01 selection - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

With a selection active, you can create an Adjustment Layer to apply the selection to the Layer Mask.

02 adjustment mask - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

This Adjustment Layer will only target the brighter pixels of your image. If you make an adjustment, you’ll notice that you will only affect the bright pixels and not the dark ones.

03 adjustment lights - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

You can target dark pixels by inverting the selection. To do so, Select the Layer Mask, and clicking on Invert in the Properties panel.

04 invert mask - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

Now if you make an adjustment, the dark pixels will be affected and not the bright.

05 adjustment darks - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

#2 – Spot Healing Brush Tool Modes – Lighten and Darken

One way to remove wrinkles, blemishes, and other distractions from the face quickly and efficiently is to use the Modes in the Spot Healing Brush Tool and Content-Aware.

First, think of the blemish, wrinkle, or distraction that you are trying to remove. Is it darker than the skin tone or is it brighter than the skin tone?

06 portrait - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

In this case, the wrinkles are darker than the skin tone. That means that you want to “lighten” those wrinkles.

With the Spot Healing Brush Tool selected, in the Options bar, click on Content-Aware, and under the Mode drop-down menu, select Lighten.

07 lighten - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

Then start painting with a small brush and small strokes over the wrinkles to remove them. But you will not lose essential details in the highlights. The Spot Healing Brush tool is only targeting dark pixels which are the wrinkles.

08 before after - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

If your blemish or distraction is brighter than the skin tone, such as the bright wrinkles above the lip, then select Darken from the Mode drop-down menu, and paint them away.

10 final heal - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

To learn more about how this technique works, check out this video on the Spot Healing Brush Tool:

#3 – Open the Same Image in Two Windows

In Photoshop, you can open the same image in two windows and set them side-by-side to work on both details and the overall image at the same time.

This technique is great when you are working with two monitors. But even with one monitor, this technique can be very useful.

To open the same document in two windows, go to Window > Arrange, “New Window for [Name of Document].” Then go to Window > Arrange > Two up Vertical to put the two tabs side-by-side. You can then Zoom into one window, and zoom out on the other.

same doc two windosw - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

These are not two separate files. They are the same document, and any adjustments that you make to one will reflect on the other instantly.

#4 – Targeted Selections with Color Range

The Color Range command can be an excellent tool for selecting difficult areas of an image. However, if you simply use the Color Range on a problematic image, it may not give you the results you want. Sometimes there is too much information on a single image, and you need to focus on just one area.

To focus the Color Range in only one area, create a selection around the object that you want to select. A simple rectangular selection will be fine.

12 selection - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

Then go into Select > Color Range, and you will see that Color range is now focusing solely on the selected area.

13 color range - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

Select a red color on the shirt using the eyedropper, then use the fuzziness slider to adjust the selection.

Keep in mind that it is going to be next to impossible not to select the hands or the railing that she’s leaning on because the skin tones and the paint on the railing are very similar in color to the red that you are trying to select.

But you can use the Lasso tool to quickly deselect those areas, leaving only the red in the shirt selected.

14 selection only red - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

With a selection active, you can create a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer that will just target the red in the shirt.
Then use the Hue slider to change the color of the shirt.

15 change color - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

#5 – Use the Lab Color Mode

Most of the time, you will work with RGB or CMYK while in Photoshop. But there is another Color Mode that you can use that can be very useful in certain situations. If you go to Image > Mode > Lab Color, you will change your photo’s color mode to Lab.

16 color mode - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

The Lab color mode has three channels: Lightness, A, and B.

The Lightness channel contains the detail of the image – the Luminance values.
“A” is the relationship between green and magenta. These are the same colors as the Tint slider in Lightroom and Camera Raw.
“B” is the relationship between blue and yellow. These are the same colors as the Temperature slider in Lightroom and Camera Raw.

17 lab graphic

One of the most significant advantages of working with the Lab color mode is that Lab separates detail (luminosity) from color. This separation allows you to work with color without affecting detail and vice versa.

17 red dress - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

For example, you could turn a red dress green by duplicating the layer, and then selecting “A” from the Channel’s panel, and pressing Cmd/Ctrl+I to invert the channel.

18 a channel

Notice that the color of the image changed, but the detail was left intact.

19 green layer - 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers

You could then use a Layer Mask to contain the adjustment to only the dress.

20 mask dress

Another advantage of using the Lab color mode is that you can sharpen without affecting the color of a photo. If you apply any sharpening filter to the Lightness channel, you will only target the detail and will leave the color intact.

The example below has the same Sharpening filter applied to both the regular image and the Lightness channel in Lab Color. I’ve made sharpening effect an extreme one for demonstration purposes, to make the results more noticeable.

Notice that when you apply sharpening to the Lightness channel (right), the colors on the edges are not saturated or changed. They only become brighter or darker. While the sharpening on the regular layer increases the saturation of the edge pixels.

21 sharpening

As a side note, Photoshop doesn’t really add detail to an image when you apply sharpening. It creates the illusion of detail by adding contrast to the edges in the photo. You can see that edge contrast in these extreme adjustments.

You can learn more about sharpening in this video on sharpening photos in Photoshop:

One important thing to note is that the Lab color mode does not have access to all the Adjustment Layers, and some Adjustment Layers will work a bit different than their RGB counterparts.

If you are working with Adjustment Layers and you would like to go back to the RGB color mode, you will have to put the image, and the Adjustment Layers in a Smart Object then make the conversion. Otherwise, Photoshop will ask you to delete the Adjustment Layers or flatten the image.

Conclusion

I hope you found these tips helpful for retouching or editing your images in Photoshop. Do you have any other tips or tricks that you use? Please share in the comments below.

The post 5 Must-Know Photoshop Retouching Tips and Tricks for Photographers by Jesus Ramirez appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

24 Oct

Macphun’s Luminar is a versatile beast. While a lot is made of processing landscapes and cityscapes, you find it also happens to be a very capable portrait editor. Follow along with this walkthrough to see how I use Luminar to edit a portrait.

Getting Started

Open your photo in Luminar. As you’ll be using more of a layer based workflow than presets for now, turn off the presets panel by clicking on the second last icon in the upper right of your screen. You’ll get more space and more of the image to work with this way.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

For your first layer (as well as with further layers), you’ll need to click the Add Filter button to add controls. You can have as many filters as you like on one layer.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

Image Tonal Balance

Your first step is to improve the overall tonal balance of your portrait. This one is a little dark, but at the same time, there’s no true black in the photo. If you look at the histogram, there’s a gap at the top (right side) where the wall could be whiter. There’s also a gap at the bottom (left side) where areas like the eye pupil could be darker.

The best filter in Luminar to fix this is Tone. You can select this from the filter list that appears after you click the Add Filter button. You can also just enter the name of a filter in the Search field to find it faster if you know the name of the filter you want.

Notes: As you get comfortable with Luminar’s filters, you’ll probably find yourself using several of the same ones frequently. To make them even easier to find, click on the “star” to the left of the filter name to designate them as “favorites”. Thereafter, choose the Favorites category at the top of the Add Filters panel for speedy access to your most-used filters.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

For the dark part, you’ll drag Blacks slider down (left) to taste. For the brightness, you should use the Smart Tone slider. This really neat slider allows you to brighten the image while protecting highlights, or darken while protecting the shadows. This is better than Exposure, which will clip highlights and shadows.

The remaining sliders should be adjusted until you feel the photo looks good. You’ll see there’s a small change in Highlights and Shadows here, along with a tiny amount of Whites. The settings will, of course, be different for every image.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

At any stage, you can check your progress by clicking on the eye icon to preview, or click the Before/After view to reveal a slidable Before/After preview.

How to preview your edits using the before and after slider.

Removing Blemishes

I know you’re thinking that my subject’s skin is flawless, but in close, there is work to do. You may have more or less to do for your portrait, but the same principles apply. You find the Clone tool on the right panel in Luminar. Clicking it will render a new layer to edit. As this is a rendered layer, it effectively means you’re not working on a raw file anymore, but as you’ve got a good balance of tones to edit, this is fine. You may want to leave this step until later if this bothers you.

The Clone tool is on the right-side panel in Luminar.

Once the render is complete you’ll be presented with the cloning screen, asking you to “Click to set the source” (as seen below). The source is the location you’re copying to fix the area you need to work on (which is the destination). To set a different source after this, hold down the Alt/Option button and click where you want the source.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

Cloning

Next, fix under the eyes by setting your source point to the cheek below. You can quickly change the brush size, using the square bracket keys [ and ]. For adjusting the brush softness (feather) hold the shift key with the square bracket keys. For certain areas, you don’t want to eliminate the destination completely (e.g. you still want some of the lines under the eyes to look natural) so drop the opacity a bit. 50% is a good place start if you’re not sure.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

To completely wipe over an area, set your opacity to 100%. Set the brush size to just slightly larger than the blemish. Choose an area that matches both the texture and brightness of the area around the blemish as your source point.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

An old retoucher’s trick is to set a low opacity (like 20%) and then brush over the image slowly, removing blemishes while sampling different areas. This can smooth out texture too much, so just take care while you do it. Click Apply when you’re done.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

In the case of my example image, there are one or two areas still to fix, but I’ll clean this up at the end of the main retouch, before applying a final finish.

Soft Glow

Next, you’ll need a new layer, as you’ll be masking off the filters you use on this layer. Masking allows you to hide areas you don’t want to be affected by the layer. Click the + sign in the Layers panel and choose Add New Adjustment Layer.

How to do Portrait Retouching With Luminar

Choose Soft Glow from the Filters list for this layer. As you increase the Amount of glow, you’ll notice that it also increases the brightness of the portrait, so use the Brightness slider to reduce it. You can also increase Smoothness to taste. Portraits can also usually benefit from some added Warmth.