Editing a Portrait With Only Lightroom

I have had a couple people ask me questions on how I do my process. One of the questions that has come up multiple times is how to edit using only Lightroom. Adobe has creative cloud with photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99 a month, so photoshop is even more accessible and affordable than ever. When I first started doing photography, I almost exclusively did weddings, so naturally Lightroom was my first editing program. I used only Lightroom for the first year, which was great for weddings as I had minimal skin retouching or editing at all. I soon ran into problems when I started to do more portraits; initially I had to use Lightroom for a little while to edit my portraits. This blog is about only using Lightroom to edit your photos; unfortunately, you cant do any composites but you are able to do some skin retouching with it.

​Below is the before and after shots!

This video is the entire process of editing this photo. Some key things that occurred in this video are:
- Spot Removal to remove hairs and blemishes
- White Balance
- Sharpening
- Adjusting the Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, and Clarity
- Using the Adjustment Brush to contour or do the concept of dodging and burning
- Adjusting the saturation of my reds (as my camera shift a little red) in the H/S/L section 
- Clicking of "Remove Chromatic Aberration"
- Adding a slight Vingette

When I use the Spot Removal Brush in Lightroom, I always pick where its selecting to copy from. It likes to pick things similar to the original area, so if your trying to get rid of a blemish it usually finds another blemish to copy from (which is not what you want). All you have to do it move the circle to a location that you want to mimic (ideally a smooth clean area). This is crucial for blemishes or hairs that intersect with lines you actually want to keep. In the video I remove a hair that is running over his eyebrow and eye. I would usually spend more time on this and actually zoom in on this even more then a 1:1 ratio.
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Tip: Some retouchers say that in photoshop they zoom in 800%.

Here is a quick look at the troubled areas before it was retouched. There are blemishes on the forehead and there is also bigger sized pores on the nose that I retouched in the video. For the chest area, I got rid of all the blemishes but I did leave some of the moles/beauty marks on the skin.

Tip: You can also minimize a bigger mole by using the spot removal tool, then change the opacity.

Those dots on the below image are all the spots that I used with the Adjustment Brush. On the background I just blended the background (as my paper had some lines in it that I removed with the Spot Healing Brush) I used clarity and sharpness to help blend it. The dots on his face are what I used to "contour", yes I even do it on guys, it helps give them that chiseled feature. I contoured by increasing the contrast, decreasing the highlights and also creating more shadows; keep in mind I only move the sliders slightly (nothing extreme). I also do the opposite (increase the contrast, increase the highlights and lessen the shadows) to lighten the skin (underneath the eyes, between the eyes on his forehead, and I slightly increase the highlights and shadows on the eyes). I also used the same method on his abs to help define them even more.

Down below are screen shots of the settings on the final image (the color one). Notice that none of the settings are far to the left or far to the right. Never go all the way in one direction. I hardly ever touch the exposure in my pictures, as you need to get the right exposure in camera. I always sharpen my images, as you always need to sharpen your images, there is no exception (also I never go over 100 in the amount slider).

Tip: Sometimes when your doing a wedding, the noise is higher so I will sharpen to 100 and use the noise reduction tool. Anywhere from 25-50 luminance is acceptable.

​Happy shooting,
​Shelby