From the course: Portrait Photography: High School Seniors

Using Lightroom for touch-ups

From the course: Portrait Photography: High School Seniors

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Using Lightroom for touch-ups

- [Narrator] I'm not a heavy duty brush guy in Lightroom, but there are a few things that sometimes you just have to do, in the case of this portrait here of Ashley, these couple hairs right here really jumped out, even when you were to zoom out-- (laughs) You can see them, they're just so annoying. So I had to do something about them, so what I did was I enabled spot removal, right over here and I did a little work. In the spot removal, we have both Heal and Clone. On these sort of jobs, I'm usually using healing brush because it reads the information around the correction and I just think it's a little easier to work with. And basically, all you do is draw, once you enable it, just draw right on the area that you want to correct. Now I had to do a little work on this because we also have these two hairs going this way so if I just do this, those will be out of line. So let me show you the process, I'm going to come over to the history pallet here, I'll show you what I did. So first thing I did, was make this one correction here where I just drew a cross and you can see that these two vertical hairs here are out of alignment and there's really no way to do the correction without that happening, believe me, I tried. And that's what happens with hair sometimes, it's just very difficult to work with. So then what I did, was I used the healing tool to go up and down here and it took the sample from over here which I didn't really want but just to get rid of all that stuff right there and then what I did was I moved the sample over to here and used this as the area that I wanted to basically replicate over here but in a very intelligent way. Then I got rid of this guy down here, did the same thing. One little spot right there and then just come up right here and I'm going to go ahead and turn this off. So I just click on that again and now we know where things happen so we can see, you know, "ooh, I think I see a little "detection of some sort of correction there." Yeah, we're zoomed in and we know where it happened. When I zoom back out though, believe me, you're not going to notice it. So, you know, sometimes when you're working with hair and you're doing spot removal, healing, that kind of stuff, you have to be creative. You have to try a couple different things. Now the other thing I want to show you, are the eyes. So I'd like to sharpen those up a bit. So I'm going to use the brush tool to do that, I'm going to some right over here to the brush tool, I've enabled that and then I have all these different options, sharpening and clarity are two of those options so I'm just going to go ahead and up them right now so that when I paint on the eyes they will sharpen up. And then I just sharpen up right here. You don't want to overdo it, just want to sharpen them up just a little bit just like that and I'm going to hold down the space bar so I can move over to the other eye and we'll do the same thing there. Just kind of sharpen those up just a bit. Isn't that nice, now you can go crazy if you want, I don't recommend it. If I add more sharpness, it will do it on both of those areas that I've worked on. And you know, we have all these different tools here to choose from with our brush and so we can do all sorts of work, we can smooth things out, we can sharpen things up. This case, I'm just going to sharpen up those two eyes. When I'm done, I'm just going to turn off the brush tool there and now I'm going to zoom back out. So we've soften the skin tones, we've brought back a little vignetting, we've sharpened the eyes, we got rid of a few stray hairs, before we leave here, let's just do our before and after. There's where we started, we got hairs and wrong tones and-- (laughs) All sorts of things. Here's where we are right now, just using a few basic tools in Lightroom in the develop module and then I can move on to the next portrait. Now you can see why earlier, when I was saying you only want to work on your best shots, we did spend a few minutes here. And I don't want to do that 100 times. 10 times, 15 times, that's fine, not 100. And that's why I'm using the system and recommending the system for your portrait work as well.

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