Skin Softening and Brush Work
Lesson 2 from: Developing and Retouching in Adobe Lightroom ClassicJared Platt
Skin Softening and Brush Work
Lesson 2 from: Developing and Retouching in Adobe Lightroom ClassicJared Platt
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Skin Softening and Brush Work
now what I want to do is I want to actually go in and work on her skin. I want to soften the skin up a little bit, so that's just a nicer skin tone. And if I were to do this in the develop module just globally, I could do it with the texture or the clarity knobs. But the problem is the texture and clarity. Knobs are global, so they're affecting everything in the photograph, including her hair, the textures on her dress, all that kind of stuff. So what we want to do is we want to select just the area of her skin that we're gonna work on. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to click on the brush and I'm going to go in with the brush and paint on effect. And that effect is going to be a negative texture, a little bit of positive clarity, just so that, like I get some nice like, the chunkier things get a boost. But the skin gets a little bit of ah, cover of, ah, softness to it. The other thing, that and I'm I'm doing this so you can see what I'm thinking when I'm creating an effect.
So I'm gonna work on the texture So let me zoom in So you can see this. I'm gonna work on the texture Bring it down I'm gonna add a little bit of clarity just so I get sharpness in the eyes and the eyeliner and stuff like that. But I'm gonna take contrast down So I'm taking contrast down Because all of the all of the things that you see an inconsistent skin is a matter of contrast inside the skin. So I'm taking the contrast down itself. I'm going to bring the shadows up just a little bit so that I've got kind of ah filling in the shadows cause the shadows create like, texture in the skin like a poor Think about a poor It's it's a shadow. Um And so I've done all of that. And then the last thing I want to do is take a little sharpness out. Remember, if you were take sharpness on a global photo and just really jack up the sharpness of the super Sharp, you would see that the face would get like, crunchy and it because it's sharpening the actual pixels and so it would get really crunchy and ugly. And so when you take the the sharpness down, you do the opposite and you smooth it out. So those are the kind of things that I would do in order to create this effect to give me a nice soft look on her face. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna brush that in, but in order for you to see what I'm doing right below the photo on the left hand side here is a show selected mask overlay, and I just gonna paint it in and show you the overlay. And I have the overlay as green, you can choose what color the overlay will be. But I'm just doing a green overlay and I'm just coming in and painting her arm. And I'm painting this arm here and then her face. So there's all the skin and you're probably wondering, uh, Jared, that's not very accurate. And that's fine. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be super accurate. Ah, and I'll show you why in a second. So the first thing we're gonna do is check and see how our settings worked. So let's go toe Oneto one and then let's look and I'm going to just turn this on and off. So remember I said all these settings before I ever even painted anything. I was just I knew kind of what needed to be done based on the idea of what creates texture on skin. And so, based on that idea, it looks good, and I'm gonna turn it on and off so you can see the final effect. So here's what it looks like before, and here's what it looks like after see how it glows. It's just a nice, healthy glow to her skin. There's still texture in it. There's still pours. You can still see things in her skin, but it's soft. It looks good. It's not like, uh, it doesn't look like dolls like Plasticky doll Look, um, so I like the way that looks. So now that I've tested all of the settings that I just made, here's a little tip. You actually get to create a preset here, So we're gonna go in, let me zoom in here again, and I'm going on this effect. I'm gonna click the custom right above it says custom and I'm going to go down to the very bottom of this list and at the very bottom, and I want you to look at how they're labeled. See all that. So see, I have all these skin options, and I really like that one. It's a really great look on her skin, so I'm going to save that as a preset. So I'm gonna do it under hair and makeup. So that's in the four hundreds, and I'm just going to do it as 4 So it's going to be 4 10 and I will call it healthy, warm, healthy glow. That's what we just call healthy glow. All right, so 410 is gonna be the name of that. So I'm going to save it as a new preset, and I'm gonna call it four for Healthy Glo. Oh, I need to put skin at the beginning of it there. So for 10 skin healthy glow, and so now when I click on it, see, it's right in its right position, so very easy. And if I ever want to rename it, which I think I kind of messed up on the name I said, Yeah, there should be a dash. There should be a dash after instead of before. So I'm just gonna go back down here and I'm gonna rename the preset and we're gonna call it Skin dash healthy glow and get rid of that and rename There we go. So now it's gonna fall right into place with all of my other presets. So I click on that. So from here on out, if I ever want that skin healthy glow again, all I have to do is go in here If I create, If I go to brush something and it's, you know, on some other, I could just click on it and go toe for 10 skin healthy glow. And I've got everything mapped out the way I want it and then just painted in. So use those presets again. Just never do anything twice if you if you've If you've done something once and it took you a while to figure out what you liked and what style you liked, save it is a preset so that you never have to do that again. You just toggle it on and paint
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