You can then tweak the Tint slider to balance out the green (left) and magenta (right) in your portraits. You can choose the one that best matches your shooting conditions, or see how it looks with Auto.Īlternatively, you can tweak the White Balance manually using the two sliders: start off by dragging the Temp slider - left will make it colder (i.e., bluer), while right will make it warmer (yellower). From here you’ll find As Shot, Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, etc. The second method is to choose one of the options from the drop-down menu. To be as accurate as possible with your portraits, you can always shoot with something like an X-Rite Color Checker or, failing that, just a sheet of white paper. Keep in mind that shades of grey can have more colour in them than you realise and using a grey that’s not neutral as your reference point can cause your photos to have a colour cast. You can then click on your grey or white area and the white balance will change automatically. In the Basic panel, you’ll see an eyedropper that can be grabbed by clicking it or by pressing W. If there’s something that’s a neutral grey or white in your photograph, you can tell Lightroom to use this as a point of reference for the entire image. There are a couple of different ways to achieve this. The first step to achieving realistic skin tones in your Lightroom portrait editing is to find the right white balance. While this can be useful at times, you might be missing out on some skills that will come in useful later on in your photographic journey. In addition, heavy portrait editing can hide aspects of the photo that might otherwise have required some work. Not many brides will want a brutal orange and teal split toned edit for their wedding day, for example. This is especially important when it comes to working with portraits. Heavy editing has its place for when you want to push your creativity, but it’s best to learn the rules before you decide to break them. If the answer is yes, it’s time to wind it back. My rule for learning is to ask a non-photographer friend if they can tell that you’ve edited a photograph. If the first thing a person sees when looking at your photo is the editing, you’ve gone too far. While landscapes and street photography can sometimes lend themselves well to a heavy edit, it’s best to start off by aiming to keep your portraits looking realistic. See also: 7 Popular Lightroom Editing Styles to Try Today Don’t go too heavy with your edit These two things will make your Lightroom editing process much easier and learning how to shoot portraits will give you an advantage when it comes to editing them. Soft, even lighting will avoid you needing to get rid of dark shadows, and a good lens coupled with knowledge of how to focus will ensure that you get eyes that are sharp. (Don’t already own Lightroom? Here’s how to get it.) Get it right in cameraĪ well-composed, well-lit portrait shot on a high-quality camera will not only require less editing, but it will also be much easier to edit. There’s not a definitive series of steps to follow when editing your portrait as different images often require a different way of going about things, and making changes to one area might mean that you need to go back and tweak something else.Įxperience is key, but this list is a good place to get started - just don’t assume that every step always has to happen in the same order. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” method for how to edit portraits in Lightroom, but there are a number of tools to understand, processes to learn, and tricks to implement that should give you a solid foundation upon which to build. Like everything, this is just a matter of practice, and this guide will give you some great tips to get you started along your path to becoming a master at portrait editing using Adobe Lightroom. Knowing how to work systematically will help you to achieve consistent results. Simply knowing how to use certain tools isn’t going to give good results until you also train your eye to see which parts of an image require some tweaking. If you want to learn how to edit portraits in Lightroom, you should first understand that it’s not just about knowing how to make specific changes it’s about figuring out what needs to be edited. It is, however, very rewarding and enjoyable, allowing you to take a photo and create an image that really grabs the viewer’s attention.Īs with many genres of photography, every portrait photograph is different, with lots of variation depending on everything from the lighting and background through to the tonality of your subject’s skin. Editing portraits in Lightroom is an art.
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