Tutorial – A Light Retouch

Original Image

The shot was made using a 580exII speedlite and an Apollo 28″ softbox without the diffusion screen.

Step 1 – Exposure Adjustments

The softbox was off to camera left, and very close to Sarah which would potentially cause an issue with all her light blond hair. To avoid blowing the highlights in her hair I deliberately underexposed the image slightly so an exposure adjustment was necessary to lighten everything up. I dialied this in by eye to give

• Exposure +1.00
• Highlight Recovery +10
• Black Clipping +6
• Fill Light +10

Step 2 – Pre-soften Skin

LightRoom’s Clarity slider in the Presence panel does wonderful things to skin if you give it a negative value. I typically use a value of -40 (as in the case of this image) as I find that gives very pleasing results and removes a lot of minor blemishes speeding up the workflow immensely. this slider will go all the way to -100 but that is way too extreme for my liking.

Step 3 – Fine Tune Exposure

Looking at the image I decided at this stage it was too bright and I was concerned about losing detail in the hair highlight. To fix this I backed off the exposure adjustment I made in step 1 above to give…

• Exposure +0.50
• Highlight Recovery 0
• Fill Light +20

Step 4 – Soften Skin

Now I’m happy with the exposure, its time to concentrate on the skin. This is very easily fixed with the adjustment brush using the Soften Skin preset. Simply load the brush and paint away 🙂 covering all the areas that need softening.

The adjustment brush is a great tool, perfect for making localised changes to an image and as with everything in LightRoom, is completely non-destructive.

I find that this brush can overdo things is you’re not careful and if you find the skin has been over softened you can simply select the brush stroke group and change the settings. The default is to use a clarity setting of -100 and a sharpness of +25. Backing off the clarity of the brush strokes  will retain some of the texture of the skin if it starts to look too much like plastic.

Step 5 – Heal Skin

With the skin softened most of the minor blemishes will have been fixed. Steps 2 and 4 above between them have saved a lot of time. The skin still needs some attention though and this is where the spot removal brush comes in.

This brush works exactly like the healing brush in PhotoShop (it can be configured to behave as the clone stamp tool instead but that is beyond the scope of thie tutorial).

Using the spot removal tool the major blemishes were dealt with.

Step 6 – Brighten Eyes

Time to turn the attention to the eyes and brighten the whites slightly. The trick here is to not go too far. I see a lot of images where the retoucher has over whitened the eye and in a few extreme examples simpley overpainted it with a white brush. Get this bit wrong and the subject looks demonic. A very light adjustment is all that is required. The goal is to preserve the tree-dimensionality of the eye whilst lightening it ever so slightly.

The tool I used here is the adjustment brush once more but this time with the Teeth Whitening preset. You’ll most likely find that this preset takes the white of the eye too far so once you have painted the brush strokes in you can edit the setting to tune it to your liking.

Step 7 – Iris

With the whites fo the eyes taken care of the iris now looks a little dull. We can solve this with the adjustment brush once more but this time using the Iris Enhance preset.

Set the brush small enough to just cover the width of the iris and using a single brush stroke sweep it around the iris. You’ll find that the adjustment is far too much and I almost always back off the exposure and saturation settings until I get something I like.

Step 8 -Fine Tune Crop

With the major adjustments made I wanted to fix the background at the bottom left of the image.

When I took the shot Sarah was sitting on the sofa and one of the cushions can be seen next to her leg. I found this distracting and wanted to remove it so I simply cropped the image tighter. The downside is her right hand. I’m not sure I like it in this shot and it too is a distraction.

Step 9 – Final Skin Soften

All that remained now was just a few finishing touches. The first of which was a final soften of the skin, exactly as before…

Step 10 -Final Skin Heal

…followed by a last quick dab with the spot removal tool to take care of anything I’d missed earlier…

Step 11 – Fix Hair Highlight

…and a local exposure adjustment of the highlight on Sarah’s hair using an exposure setting of -0.5 on the adjustment brush.