Lessons

Lesson Info

Portrait of a Man

Welcome to this full portrait editing session. I'm going to be taking everything we've learned in this section of the course so far from all the skills with adobe Lightroom CC and walk through how we can make a photo look better. Now. This photo that you're seeing right here was shot with Sam's Sony, a beautiful sigma lens. It's got that nice shallow depth of field. It's already practically, you don't need to do much. This photo on the other hand was shot with the Cannon T five II, which is more of a basic camera, more the kit lens, which isn't, you know, amazing in a location without great lighting. And so I'm going to make it hard on myself. I want to make, even though this photo is unedited, I want to make this photo look good. Have a similar style with that shallow depth of field and just look better. So I'm going to walk through this entire edit and so you can follow along if you want. Alright, so first I'm going to crop, that's the first thing I like to do. This photo is composed...

relatively well. The only thing I don't like is see this little part over here that's part of the wall that he was leaning next to. So let's go into our crop and just crop in slightly to get rid of that. You can also use the clone filter if you want to get rid of that. But I also want to just crop in just a little bit because the right side of Will's face. Um, it's he's kind of sitting to the left. So I want to make sure his face and his eyes are as centered as possible. So something like that looks pretty good. This will be great for like a headshot for a linkedin profile or if will decides to start acting or something like that. Alright so next we want to do our basic adjustments including our white balance. White balance is pretty good. Let me just warm up everything a bit, decreased the green just a little bit by increasing the tint. That seems to look pretty good. Then the exposure, this is the photo we practice exposure with earlier and you can see that the highlights back here are just crazy. This wasn't the perfect location but we're dealing with it. So let's bring down our whites. Let's also bring down our highlights a bit. So we have at least some sort of information back there while we're at it. We're going to play with our blacks at a little bit of contrast by bringing down our black point. Then our shadow may well bring up just a little bit just to get a little bit of that detail back from Will's hair with the virus, will increase the vibrance just slightly and that looks good. Sometimes what I like to do is increase the virus and then decrease the saturation just a little bit so that it is increasing the colors like these reds but then it decreases sort of the, it does the reverse of decreasing the reds and the oranges in the skin tone. So it still looks a little natural. So that looks pretty good for portraits. I'm not going to play with clarity here. I'm going to use some of my more detailed adjustments with my brushes and my other adjustments up there in just a second. one other cool trick to see if you have a good range of exposures in your image is to see where your pure blacks and your pure whites are. You can kind of see this up here in our history Graham up here and we can see that we have a good range of exposures. But say I take my black slider and I'm adjusting and I want the black to be pure black and that's generally what you want. If something's black you want it to be black in this image. There's not much black. Maybe some of Will's hair, maybe parts of his eye. If I hold the option key down, look what happens. We are seeing sort of a white image and the detail that we're starting to see as I drive to the left, that's what's going to be pure black. And you can also see in the history Graham in the top right, That there's now pure black, it's touching that left edge. Now if I go all the way like this, this is too much, all the information in that hair is lost and his eyes is lost. So I don't want to go that far. I just want to touch it. So it's something like that were just the beginning of his hair gets to be lost in that pure black. Now for the pure white we can do the same if we hold the option key down and click the whites, we can see as we drag to the right when things become pure white. Now I don't I want there to be pure white in this image because there's nothing that I want to be completely overexposed. But I just wanted to show you that and you can see that in the history RAM as I dragged the whites to the right, you see that pure white. Okay, so I'm not holding the option key anymore and I'm bringing down the whites. So we have that information in the background. What I like about this first image of will let's go back to that one. Is that the softness? I mean even his eyes are sharply in focus. His mouth is but even just like his cheek and his ears, you start to get that shallow depth of field. And I just didn't use a lens. I didn't have a lens and a lot of you won't have a lens that can get that shallow depth of field. See his ear and his eyes are generally in the same focus but we can use our adjustment brushes and filters to get that sort of fake out of focus look. So to get that sort of shallow depth of field for everything except his eyes were going to use the radial filter. So check that on, Make sure you have show selected mask overlay on and then just create a sort of an oval shape. You probably want to start in the middle of his eyes and then just you can rotate it by hovering over the edge and rotating something like that. Okay, so now turn off show selected mask overlay which is the keyboard shortcut o on your keyboard which you can use now to make it easier. And let's drop the sharpness and we'll also drop the clarity just a little bit. I don't drop the clarity too much because then it starts to get a little bit like blurry and watercolor. E Kind of style the sharpness is more of a better way to create that sort of shallow depth of field look. Okay, so this looks good because the eyes are now in focus. But I also want his lips and his nose to be in focus too. So what I can do is with this radial filter selected click the brush tool and now click erase and it might be helpful to press o on your keyboard. So you see the mask overlay And I'm gonna put the flow at around like 77. So I might have to brush over things a couple of times. The opacity of this brush is a little bit lower now and if I just paint over his nose I mean his nose should be in focus. Same with his mouth, it was a little distracting with his mouth not being in focus and that looks pretty good. And now maybe I'll increase my brush size and drop the flow and just paint over his face once I'm just clicking and dragging once and maybe clicking and dragging one more time. So parts of his face are still in focus, but his eyes are really what's in focused and if I turn this off on and off now you can see that it created this sort of nice out of focus. Look, we could do this again and make it a little bit more extreme by clicking new and then creating an oval sort of around his whole face just like so rotate it so that it matches up with the way that his face is turned. Go to see the mask overlay and make sure that we are selecting the outside and not the inside And we will drop the sharpness again this time, I'm not going to drop the clarity at all and that might be a little too much. So let's go down to like negative 50 for this. Okay, so again we can turn those off and on Alex pretty darn good. Let's turn it back on click done. So that gives us a nice sort of shallow depth of field look on his eyes that I like. Now we want to make his eyes look a little bit better so let's zoom in Z on the keyboard. Let's take our adjustment brush here, we're going to make it pretty small and we're just going to adjust the whites of his eyes. Let's actually just paint over his eyes like so o on my keyboard so I can see what I'm painting over his eyes like that. Let's actually use a range mask for this with color and let's choose the color the white. Okay so now that's selecting more just the white. We can adjust the range amount down here to select more or less. So let's do a little less. So we're really just selecting the whites of his eyes o on my keyboard to turn off that mask overlay. And let's bring up the whites a little bit. You don't want to go too crazy because that starts to look a little weird but just bringing up like the whites just a little bit can make his eyes pop just a little bit more before after before after on off on see how that looks looks a little bit better. Let's do a new brush by clicking new and brushing just over his the iris of his eyes and we're going to do that iris enhanced by clicking iris enhanced their automatically. That gives a little bit more pop. Alright so let's do a little bit of blemish removal. Um I noticed that will has a little cut on his lip here. So what we're going to do is take this healing brush over here, make the size pretty small. Just paint over his lip and we're going to take another part of his lip too. Place it with and that looks good. We had that one sort of pimple that looks like it was sort of it got rid of with the shallow depth of field. I'm just going to remove it like that as well. That looks pretty good. I am going to do one sort of brush overlay over his skin to soften it up a bit. So going back to our brush clicking new, changing our settings to the skin softening. Let's just paint over his skin. Just like so painting over it all. I think it's starting to look a little bit too fake. Let me zoom in. Just get up here between his eyebrows. Just painting and you can kind of see if I press oh you can see where I am painting. Let's make the brush a little bit bigger. I don't want to get his eyes or anything like this because that would get rid of any of the sharpness that we added are applied going through getting his skin and the more effects you apply and the faster or slower your computer is it will actually make you know, editing a little bit slower. So let's press out to turn this off and we're going to increase the clarity and decrease the sharpness just a little bit so it's not too crazy and then click done. Okay so let's see the before after before after that's starting to look good. One thing I don't like and I didn't like from before was this green background. It's a little bit distracting if the whole thing was green I might like it a little bit more but just because it's got this overexposed background here, I'm going to go to my H. S. L. Adjustments, I'm going to go to saturation, click on my color picker, go back here to the green and decrease the saturation back there. Okay and I want to go too much because that looks fake. I just want to go a little bit so it looks a little bit better and not as distracting when I do that though the background starts to look a little bit dreary so what I want to do is make the background warmer without affecting Will's face. So one way we can do that is with our graduated filter, let's reset by just resetting all these settings and then just click and drag over his face. Actually something like this and then dragging down to the start of his shoulders, pressing oh you can see what's selected. I'm going to choose my brush to brush out his face. So I'm going to erase his face from the selection. Going to turn the flow up all the way. So I'm actually erasing his face and I'm actually gonna turn auto mask off so it's not trying to auto mask anything. You could do this like another way is if you just use the brush adjustment brush, it might have been quicker to just use that and to brush around the background. This was kind of a multiple step process that might not have been the quickest. Okay, so now we have the selection of the background pressing. Oh so we can see what we're doing. Let's warm it up just a little bit, going too far. It might look kind of cool for you but I'm just going to do it just a little bit. Okay, so if I delete this brush, selecting it pressing, delete you can see what it's doing. It's just adding a little bit of warmth along with this. I want to add a little bit of style with a vignette. So let's close down our adjustments at the top, go down to effects and let's add a little bit of a post crop vignette. I don't want to do a highlight or a white one. I want to do a dark one going about their pretty subtle, increase the feathering to make it even more subtle, something like that, you can let the highlights go through if you want. I'm not going to though. So now let's see the before and after by clicking this button down here. Yeah, the before and after. I feel like the softening of the skin is maybe a little too intense. Maybe it's just because I know will but I feel like it looks like he's got like a porcelain face or something. So let's go back to our adjustment brushes. Let's see the one that actually that was the brush, not the radial filter. I think it's this one up here. Yeah that one. So let's um increase the clarity. Let's just delete that, see what that does. Yeah I think um with the clarity around 14 or so or 15 that works good in the sharpness around 15. That looks a little bit better, a little bit more natural. I'm actually really liking this. You can tell from the before and after. Look how much more out of focus Will's shirt is, the background is more out of focus. The focus on the eyes is definitely more poignant. His hair is a little bit out of focus, maybe a little bit too much. So what we can do is go back to one of the brushes four. Let's see what was the eyes now, it was one of our radial brushes for the focus. This is our selection and we can brush out a little bit more. So let's go to our brush a race and just make it smaller, turn down the flow. Let's just erase a little bit in his hair so the front of his hair is in focus, something like that. A lot of this is just kind of playing around to see what you like, and that's looking pretty good, it might be a little bit too warm, I'm just going to decrease the white balance just a little bit, even though that's combating everything. That's an overall adjustment, it's making the background even less warm, even though we added that sort of warmth to the background, I think that looks a little bit more natural. And then lastly we're just going to add a little bit of contrast. So I'm gonna go to my tone curve and I kind of like having this before and after up right now so I can see what's happening. Let's just add a little s curve to add some more contrast, you know, you can go crazy with it but you want to be a little careful, accidentally created too many points. Yeah, I think adding a little bit of contrast definitely helps a little bit more in terms of noise reduction. We don't really have much noise. That shot was shot during the day, so we don't have to worry too much about the noise. Overall saturation might be a little bit too saturated right now. So let's actually bring the saturation down just a little bit when you increase contrast, you actually make the colors more saturated. Um So you gotta pay attention to that if you are increasing the contrast, I could play around with this stuff forever. I feel like the contrast is a little bit too much actually go there. There we go. Okay, so I am going to be done editing this photo but I hope that you kind of enjoyed seeing my entire process. Let's go ahead and look at sort of this photo. Let's turn off the before and after. And of course it's not the same background. So it's a different style. The lighting is different. But I find that this photo in terms of quality and style looks a lot more closely to this photo compared to it before. So, using all the techniques that you've learned, you can do a lot of amazing things with your portraits to make them look even better. Definitely come up with your own style. Don't just follow and copy all the steps that I did for every single portrait. There's a lot of cool things that I did that you might want to do. Like sharpening the eyes, making the iris and the eyes more enhanced if my team will's teeth were showing. Like in this photo, I think my teeth are showing. I might go in and do a little teeth whitening to make that look a little bit better removing a few blemishes softening the skin just slightly using those cool radial filters to create sort of warmth in the background or two sort of create that fake shallow depth of field. All cool stuff that you know how to do now that you can create a cool photo with. All right, thank you so much for watching this, and we'll see you in another lesson.