Lessons

Lesson Info

Couples Portrait

Welcome to a new full editing session in adobe Lightroom. Classic. This time I'm editing a couple's portrait. So this is just a spontaneous photo that I shot of my cousin up in san luis Obispo. So nothing really set up. Just kind of a quick thing. We weren't really on a photo shoot or anything, but this is a lot of the time. This is similar to what you might be shooting a lot of the time. Just casual, you're not a professional photographer, maybe you are, but you might be just taking photos of your friends and family and how can we make something that's decent. It's decently exposed to a little bit special, a little bit more style but without being over edited. So this is one where I'm not editing like crazy in terms of color and contrast and exposure. It's still pretty natural. This one on the right but it looks, I would say a lot better. So if you want to follow along and as always make sure you download the couple's portrait photo. Alright, so let's dive into it. This is the one tha...

t we're gonna be editing really with all these basic edits. I'm not going to do much. I'm going to bring up the shadows just a little bit. That's one of the biggest things, especially in their faces in their eyes. You're losing a little bit of detail because it's lost in the shadows. I didn't crop yet. But if you want you can crop, I will crop just a little bit in. I'm using that sort of rule of thirds. Their faces aren't exactly on the rule of thirds line or the intersection, but I think putting it in and cropping in and losing a little bit of that headroom looks a little bit nicer than the wider shot. I don't want my cousin Emily right here, so much too much on this side. So maybe something like this is a little bit better. All right, So in terms of all the rest of our basic sliders, we're not really going to do anything. All of this is looking good. We're basically just going to jump right into some other specific filters. So first things first we're going to edit their faces a little bit. So one thing is that Emily was, I think she was out at the beach the day before this. So she got a little sunburn and so I do want to actually get rid of a little bit of red. So I am editing the H. S. L. Panel down here. These are our basic sliders to bring down the red. So I'm just going to bring down the red just a little bit see notice on our cheeks that you're losing a little bit of red. I want to bring out some of the colors of his shirt right now. So I'm going to take the saturation slider click there and bring that up now, I'm not going to do that for her shirt right here because if I do that it's going to bring up the reds and I just dropped the reds to get rid of some of the red in her face and also his face, he has a little bit of acne. So bringing down the reds quite a bit can help now, I don't want to go like that, they become like zombies, but just a little bit is pretty good. Okay, so overall this is looking pretty good white balance. I actually like the white mountains on them. I do want to warm up the photo a little bit more and have the attention on them a little bit more. The background is slightly blurred out, but it's still a little bit distracting to me. So I'm going to use a radial filter. So click the radio filter button. Just click and drag and let's create a little circle around them. Press O to make sure you are selecting the outside and I'm also going to brush out them or erase them. So clicking on brush, then erase let's make the sides of our brush even bigger. So let's just brush out them so we are not affecting them at all. We're just affecting the background auto mask. Might be kind of a good thing to go right here, so lightroom can help us detect the edges as much as possible. Let's get rid of this shirt right there. All right, cool. So for this first one, I'm really just going to drop the saturation the sharpness just a little bit and then also drop the clarity. So turning this on and off. You can see it does a little bit just to blur out the background even more and that's pretty much it. But the blur isn't as much as I want. So I'm actually going to create a new radial filter. Just clicking new up there. We're going to do basically the same thing, but we're also going to play with exposure. So press oh again to see what we're selecting. We're gonna turn down the feather just a little bit and then we're also going to erase part of this image. So click brush, then erase. And we're just going to erase on them first without auto mask to make sure that everything really right within them is being erased with their faces for sure. And then when we get close to the edges, that's when we might want to turn on auto mask now because there are so many details in her shirt, you want to make sure that you go over a couple of times. But with his shirt, you can tell even though I'm painting over the edge of his shirt, the background is not being selected because I first clicked on his shirt. And so it knows that this color and that exposure is what I'm trying to select. And same with his hair by painting up here. We're not really picking his hair if I want to brush on it, I can just click this a and then start brushing on just a little bit more. Let's undo that and let's turn on auto mask because I do want the background to be selected but not his ear or his shirt and you can see when I get close to the edge. It does a really good job knowing what is in the background and what is not. So this is kind of a cool technique to blur out the background or change the exposure or temperature of a background, which is what we're basically going to be doing coming up shortly just getting these details in here. Again, you could spend a lot of time doing this. This is a tutorial though, so I don't want to waste too much of your time. I hope you're enjoying these lessons, but I'm happy there. Now I'm going to press o to turn off my mask overlay and do a couple of things first, I'm going to drop down the sharpness again, I'm going to drop down the clarity again, just a little bit. Now you might be saying, well Phil why didn't you just drop the clarity down even more on that first slider and that's a good point. I could have just dropped the clarity down on the first slider or the first radial filter. Um but I just did this this way. So yeah, there's no real reason. Now I'm going to bring up the temperature so I'm going to warm up the background quite a bit and also boost the exposure just a little bit. So by boosting the exposure and maybe more so than the exposure. Overall exposure. Just the shadows. We are making the attention, making it easier for the viewer to really just look at our couple right here. So if I go and we reset this, you can see before after attention is more on our couple right here. Now there are little imperfections and what was selected. So I might go back and make sure I'm brushed on and a race in the background but overall looking pretty good. Now, overall though, one thing I noticed is that their faces and their bodies, it's a little bit weird that the background is so warm and they are a little bit cooler. So what we could do is just boost the overall warmth just a little bit so that they do get a little warmth. It still warms up the background even more but I find that looks a little bit more natural. Cool. So now let's do a couple enhancements to their face skin and things like that. So we're going to use first a brush. So we're going to brush and we're going to do a little bit of skin softening so her skin is looking pretty good. His skin. This is going to help reduce a little bit of that acne. So we're going to use the brush called soften skin. So just next to effect, make sure you click soften skin for this one. We are going to turn auto mask on and you're just gonna have to be careful with it. I'm going to turn up feathering quite a bit and we're just going to paint on like so so I'm just trying to paint over all of his skin where you can see especially acne, it's a little bit harder because he does have glasses so I don't really want to paint over the glasses. That might be a case where when I go over there I might turn auto mask on or I might be a little risky and just not. So we're going down there here there, That's pretty good for now. Alright, now, same for her skin, we can make the brush a little bit bigger. Her skin is already pretty good. But I do want to paint overall because I might decrease saturation or do a little bit of adjustment to exposure rather as well. So your skin looks pretty good down here too. Pretty soft already. Okay, cool, that's looking pretty good. Now, that would not be a good look if this was actually how we were editing it, but this is just the overlay. Okay, so let's zoom out, turn off our mask overlay and you can see now if we turn this brush on and off how it softens the skin. Now, if you don't want it to be so soft, we can bring up the clarity so it's not as crazy. And that might be something you want to do now, overall here, I might bring up the shadows just a little bit, maybe just the overall exposure. Just a little bit not too crazy. Something like that. It looks a little good. Bring down the blacks, just just a tiny bit to get back that contrast. So let's turn this on and off off on, just a little bit smoother. Their faces pop a little bit more. Alright, so let's move on to getting rid of more of his acne. We're going to use the healing brush. So that's the spot removal brush right here. So really all you have to do is like the size feathering and then the opacity we're going to leave as is now since he has a lot of acting, this is going to take a few swipes because we can't just paint over everything and get it removed. So I'm just gonna go one at a time and as we do it, it might be a little hard to see like, okay, Phil this is taking a little while, I'm not sure if it's really helping, but when we show you the before and after, it's really going to help. Now I notice how when I painted right there, it's selecting this part right here. I don't want that. So I'm going to make the selection up here in his forehead where it's there's less acne Now down here we're just going to paint really slightly again, it's making a selection down here. I'm going to see what putting up here in his forehead. I'm trying to find an exposure that's not completely off. So something like that might be good. And this is one where like the opacity might be a little bit too much. I'm just going to leave it as is but you can increase or decrease the opacity to basically um and increase or decrease the strength of this effect. Go down and make it a little bit smaller. So sometimes the light room just doesn't know what to select. It's gonna look pretty weird. So you got to pay attention to what the selection is. Now I'm going to go big here and just like this whole area now it tries to slide down here. But I think if I move up to his forehead it's gonna look a lot better. Mm hmm. It's not that great. So this is one area where going smaller might be better. I'm going to delete that. Do a couple smaller ones. Maybe dropping the opacity just a little bit. So that seemed to work better. And basically you just go on one at a time continuing This one is a little tricky. Get in here. Cool. Alright, so let's just see the before and after. This is the before. If we undo, check that out way, way better. Skin is a lot softer, awesome. So now the last thing I'm going to do is try to enhance their eyes a little bit. Their eyes are a little bit dark so we want to brighten them up, give them a little bit more saturation. So I'm going to use a brush again this time, I'm going to start with the iris enhance which boost the saturation clarity and exposure. So I'm just going to get in there. I am going to turn on auto mask, press o to turn on our select mask overlay so that I can really see what's going on. Okay, that's pretty good, pretty good. His eyes are a little bit darker, just the shadows, maybe his glasses to. That's looking pretty good. So our selection is pretty good. Now if we turn this on and off, you can kind of see it's also turning on and off their uh the skin softening on their face so I can see how that's a little bit distracting. But pay attention to her eyes right here. Now if you want to go a little bit more extreme, you can play with the color, you might want to do two separate brushes because his eyes are blue, hers are more brown and so you might want to make her eyes a little bit warmer. His eyes a little bit cooler, you can also bring up the exposure just a little bit, maybe bring back down the blacks. Now if we zoom out it might be a little bit too much. So it's pretty subtle. These are subtle, subtle changes now with his eyes, I think going in one more time. Oops, start a new brush and really add some blue so that we can see his eyes a little bit more. Okay, that's pretty good. Again, you can spend more time doing this, but if we add some blue, don't want to go too crazy, Something like that probably works pretty good. Now it's go ahead and turn those on and off off on. Pretty darn good, awesome. So the last thing I want to do is make her shirt pop. So I'm going to use another brush. I'm going to reset all these effects by double clicking effect, turn it up, leave auto mask on and I'm just going to paint over her shirt. Now this is a little tricky because when you're doing auto mask Lightroom is like, well why are you trying to select all of these colors when you don't want them or I don't know what you mean, but you just kind of have to go over them again. I really just don't want to select what's behind her. I do want to select these blues. I want to select the reds. I want to select all the colors of her blouse, so that pretty darn good. Alright, so for her shirt we're just going to boost the overall exposure just a little bit, bring back down the blacks, give it some contrast, boost the saturation overall and that's looking pretty good. You bring up the shadows just a little bit just to make it look a little bit more natural. That's looking pretty good. Alright, so this is looking pretty darn good. If we reset this, you can see the before and after. Again, if you aren't using a virtual copy, you can just press the backslash button and that will give you a complete before and after. But since we are using a virtual copy, you have to set the reset, click the reset button to see the before and after. Now. A little bit more edited than the one that I started out with. This is the one I started out with. I think the warmth and overall saturation is just a little bit stronger in this one so we can reset that temperature if we want to bring back that warmth. Their eyes are a little bit more edited as well, I might go in here, edit their teeth, make them a little bit wider. But still a fairly natural looking photo portrait of them is not completely crazy. So if you have any questions, please let me know otherwise, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and we'll see you in another one