Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is an awesome application. It helps you organize your photos, it lets you process digital RAW images, and it allows you to edit those pictures. While Photoshop offers greater flexibility and capabilities in terms of re-touching, Lightroom offers a nice set of basic tools that are fine for your average re-touching job if you know what your doing.
To help you figure that out, here are three tutorials on how to retouch portraits in Lightroom in which you might be interested.
Digital Photography How To. Digital Photography How To has a three part series on how to retouch portraits in Lightroom. The tutorial moves in steps through the process of editing an editorial image of a high school student signing a letter of intent to play college basketball. The first part focuses on removing blemishes. The second part focuses on softening skin. The final part touches briefly on how to whiten teeth in Lightroom.
The tutorial provides an original RAW image that you can edit and play along with. This lets you fully test out the capabilities of Lightroom and see how much you can achieve with some editing and retouching. It’s a good overview of the basic steps you would take in a Lightroom portrait retouching workflow.
Miville Photography. Miville Photography has a video tutorial on how to edit portraits in Lightroom and Photoshop. The video is by a wedding photographer in Lancaster, PA. It’s about 10 minutes long, and he takes a single image through a pretty thorough Lightroom workflow. He starts with adjusting all of the exposure/tone sliders in Lightroom, and then he uses the adjustment brush to make some local edits. Eventually, he shifts to Photoshop to do some cloning, before returning to Lightroom to finish up the job. So it’s not entirely a Lightroom tutorial, but it’s a good look at a working photographer’s workflow.
3 Songs No Flash. A final tutorial comes from a music/fashion photography blog, 3 Songs No Flash. It’s pretty quick, with a before and after pic of a heavily make-up’ed model. The author makes a good argument that fashion shots are typically over edited, and he goes on to describe how a few quick adjustments in Lightroom can make an important but subtle difference in a photo. There aren’t a lot of screenshots or video to support the tutorial, but it touches on some of the key tools – the tone curve, the clone/heal tool, and the adjustment brush.
Check Out Lightroom. For years, Photoshop was the go-to software for photo retouching. But, with the release and constant updating of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, that may change for your average user. Lightroom combines great organizational tools with the basic editing tools of Photoshop, at a fraction of the cost. If you don’t believe that it can be useful for editing and retouching portraits, check out these tutorials and think again. It doens’t have all the capabilities of Photoshop, no, but Lightroom is a great tool for a lot of situations.
