Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing single portraits

OK. Are you ready? I feel like this is going to be one of the more looked at editing lessons in the entire editing post and that is the single portrait editing. I've pulled some stuff from uh what we shot in the shooting section and some other older photos that I've taken the wedding from Napa that we've been looking at just to keep some consistency and to show you a couple of different examples of how I would edit. Now, I'm gonna move through this relatively quickly because there's a lot we need to get through. Um And also it's a very like repetitive nature, but I'm going to show you some key things that I'll be doing inside the portraiture uh editing, but also some things that we've learned before in the past editing things, we're going to start to apply those more with the backgrounds, the subtlety, the timing that being said, I do spend a little bit more time on these photos specifically because they are of my clients specifically, I'm also able to set these shots up a little bit m...

ore. Therefore, I'm able to know what I'm going to be capable of editing and not editing. Um And we'll talk about that when we get to the ones that you've seen me photograph in the previous videos. So let's get started. I'm going to start with the guys. Um Mostly because in general, gentlemen, um kind of like makeup and hair are a little bit easier to handle as far as um looks. Um I don't want to be discriminatory at all. Um But in modern culture, we're at a place where there's not a lot of grooming and things that are done to males necessarily. Um And they also have a little bit more of a presence in a, in a grittiness or in a harder sense. Um Again, try not to be discriminatory, but this is just the general vibe of most weddings versus women tend to be a little bit lighter, a little bit more airy, there's a little bit more emphasis on makeup and hair. So we want to make sure, you know, they're spending a ton of money on a makeup artist or a hair designer potentially. So we don't want to let that falter, right. We want to make sure that that has also been money well spent and we don't want to take away from that. Um especially with another vendor. So with the men, it's a little bit quicker, a little bit easier, not as much detail oriented versus the women. Um same sort of edits, but a little bit easier uh on the men than the women, especially with, you know, makeup and hair. Hair is like a big thing as far as editing because, you know, well, you'll see the men and the two men that I have here shooting one of them is shorter hair, one of them is longer hair, but we can get away with um a little bit more scraggly, its a little bit more grit than we can with the women. So let's go ahead and dive into our first uh dude here. So we're back at our wedding in Napa. Um This was taken um Man, the sun was moving so I needed to get them out and go take a photo. This is done with a 28 millimeter lens, a full frame. So we got kind of a big vast section here when I am shooting. Am I? I'm sorry when I'm editing these uh photos. The first thing I'm gonna do um like the other ones a little bit is crop. I wanna make sure that I'm looking at the photo that I want to look at um compositionally before I deep dive into editing. So I'm gonna go ahead and click the crop. I'm gonna hold down, shift key and I'm gonna move in the crop to where I think I like it again. I hold the shift key down so that we maintain our aspect ratio because I like my camera's aspect ratio. I'll frame it around a little bit and hit return to me. That's good. He's centered. He's looking off in a distance. Great. The next thing I'll do is I'll do a global exposure edit and I'll work our way down, uh down the list. Now again, my uh camera profile and stuff is in light room and so my colors are coming through white balanced already. Um You can do that or we could click this little, this little guy and find white, right? We want to find the neutral sort of gray or neutral white, um, that we want to balance to. And again, I kind of generally aim for gentlemen's colors. Now, you can see there's a difference, right? There's a shady color and there's a bright color. Now, if we hit the shady color, it's a little bit warmer. If we hit the bright side of the collar, it's a little bluer. So you kind of just have to decide again where you're gonna build from your style. Um I it's sunset. I would probably go with the shadier and it's a little bit uh, warmer, a little too warm for my liking. So I'm gonna dial it back just a little bit to where I think it's a little bit more natural. Um, the blue had it too blue, orange, had it orange. It's just a place to start and you can slide with your slider already looking at this. I'm aware that what's facing us is the shadow, not the overall exposure. Now, I want to bring up the overall exposure, but I don't want to lose the detail in the green in the background or the sky, but I want to see his face a little bit better because I know that his face is in the shade. I'm just going to go to the shadows and bring that up first. It's a little bit better, not enough for my liking. So I'm gonna go ahead and do a global, so I'm gonna go ahead and do a global exposure race to bring up the whole thing. Just a little bit. I don't want to lose the background. So I'm going to continue to play with the shadows. Yeah. Just bring up a little bit. This is already looking phenomenally better and he doesn't need a lot of work. This photo I, you know, I nail, I think it looks pretty good. I'm gonna add a little contrast and I'm gonna bring a little bit down on the highlights just to preserve some of the background. And again, these are global edits and a tiny bit come down on the clarity and a tiny bit on the texture. Maybe let's come up with exposure just a little bit. Yeah. Nice. So let's reset just to see what we're at. We'll see what it looks like right with the crop, the changing an hour back here. Now, now that I'm looking at it, you see the difference, it feels a little flat to me. So I'm gonna bring down on the blacks. I want more contrast come up on the whites a little bit, maybe add just global contrast and might come down on exposure just a little bit and then I am gonna bring back the blue, just a tad, just a little bit more natural. That looks a little bit nicer. Let's reset, that's looking good. Now you can now really get in and see this guy's face like the focus is a little bit behind his front eye. I miss the focus. I kind of wish the focus was on his front eye, but it's not that big of a deal breaker. That's a little bit of my bat. I'm also probably shooting at A F two, right? So the focus is very little. Now, I would go in and maybe just do a global sharpening if we click here and just add a little bit of sharpening 77. That looks a little nicer and it's hard to tell when you zoom out. And most of the time, honestly, people are gonna be looking at their, their uh photos very small unless they print it. This would still be a great print. Um If they were gonna go footprint, I'm really digging this. The only part that I think in general is that I feel like his white suit is a little green. It's getting a little bit of green kick back from the light bouncing on the uh plants and onto the his jacket. This might be hard for you to tell in watching the class because, you know, it's downloading. I don't know what monitor you're looking at, but this is how I feel if you felt like the suit was not the right color. I want to isolate it and I'm gonna go to subject or go to person and you can see how that alone entire person is just totally, uh you know, pulling out exactly what I want. Um I also think you could isolate all these little things if you wanted to. I feel like the green is hitting his entire body. So I'm gonna go ahead and um create mask and reset it just because I was using the skin thing last time. We're totally uh custom and I'm totally just going to bring in and add a little bit of pink because it offsets the green, just a tad. There we go hard to see probably through the class. But um that would be how I would adjust that. You can go extreme obviously. And that's crazy, but I want it to be just normal white that's looking a little bit nicer. Now, I also do this again. Right. Let's click this again and click people person. I want to soften his face just a little bit and I'd like to sharpen it some more without sharpening the rest of the photo. I'll click face skin body skin because I think you need to match everything together. I think if you were to do it separately, it would start to make it look, I don't know, different. Right. If the a face is affected and the neck is not and they're attached, it's just kind of look weird. So let's create mask, I'll reset it again. Make sure we're in a good spot. Just a tiny bit of clarity out, tiny bit and a tiny bit of texture just to make him look a little bit softer. I don't want to go too hard. Now, the next thing I would do would be to go to the heel mode and um I use Q to go in and out of that Q and then the QE turns back into a little um plus sign or you can hit command plus and we can zoom in. Now, normally I would go through his face and just pick out if there's like pimples sort of my rules that if it were going to be gone in a couple of weeks, I can take it out if it's like a mole or if it's like um a birthmark or something like that. I don't typically retouch that only things that we're gonna heal are gonna like disappear. He doesn't have a ton of stuff on his face where we're gonna need to do that. So he's not really a great example for that. This area right here seems a little bit harsh. So I might go press, you get my heel to see over in the right here. You can change the size by just scrolling up and down in your mouth. Um, you can change the feather. I like to have the feather around 7072. Um, and I'll do full of pasty because I think that makes it, that affects it more than anything. It's right. It's like a stamp almost. Um, but it feathers it and it blends it with the healing tool. Um Unlike the clone thing, which will just completely copy and paste onto what we're doing. So let's just click here and see how that goes. See how it's pulling from that area again. We'll pull from this area great and that looks a little bit uh a little bit better. We can turn it off and on and you can see how that kind of goes away. And I think just that little rendition is, is a nice, is a nice touch. I don't want to get rid of his mole right here because that is part of him and that feels like it's, it's something maybe I would go in and something that's catching my eye is just this little hair right here. Um I'll go to Q, I'll come down and you can click and drag so you can select an area and I feel like I always try to select an area that's nearby because it'll just blend nicer. There you go. That was just a little scraggly hair and again, he's fine. Right. This doesn't need a ton of work and we don't need to spend a ton of time fixing all these things up or anything like that. I'm pretty happy with this. You could go in and maybe adjust the, the sky if we wanted to remember our sky tool. Um, I kind of don't mind it blowing out a little bit. You could maybe de haze it a little bit and make it bluer and bring it down. If you really wanted to go extreme, that is a style, not my style necessarily. It's a little, a little extreme for me. But again, finding your own style something we're gonna talk about later, but push your limits, see where you're at, bring down the highlights. I might be a little bit a little bit more natural for me. It depends, you know, again, something to think about and find your own style. So let's go on to this next gentleman over here. Remember we shot him in the park. He's in the shade. It's a little flat at the moment. So we're let's start at the top with the crop. Um It's actually not that bad. I might come in just, just a tad just to get rid of his hair room, uh the head room a little bit. Um I like his hand there. Um So we'll keep that in frame. The tree looks great. So again, global edits. Right. I'm gonna add some contrast come down just a little bit in exposure. Do we want the detail in the background? I'll bring it down a little bit just so we can get a little bit, bring up the shadows because he's in shade like we were outside, adjust the whites a little bit, bring down the black contrast. I'll go back up just to add the exposure a little bit just so it looks a little bit nicer and right away we can see like before after. So we've gone from a sort of flat image to a little bit uh a deeper color, deeper contrast. Maybe we'll add a little saturation and see we're at color wise, his skin tones about right in there. Now, you can do all this in the tone curves which we had talked about before. It's a little bit more of an advanced editing. You can get into that and start doing that, but it might slow you down if you're not used to uh editing a lot of photos at this point. And I'll use the tone curves more in black and white when I'm really spending a lot more time on things outside of weddings or if there's one photo I really need to dial in, that's more for an advanced um editing thing. So for now we had a little bit sharpening here. He looks pretty good like this is a pretty OK general global shot. Now, I will go in and just soften a tad, right? Because it is a little harsh up here. He's got a little bit of skin, um you know, uh not flattery issues. So let's go in person and we will do face skin and body skin, but mostly because I want everything to match create mask and let's reset. You can see how that went soft right away because I had that setting before. We'll just do a little bit of clarity. A little bit of minus texture, a little bit of minus clarity. A little bit of minus D haze. We don't look like a cartoon, right? If we went too far, that looks fake. So we still have to leave a little bit of texture in there and a little bit of clarity in there. So it's not crazy, but this way you can kind of tell it's softer, subtle and a little, you know, a little lighter, a little, a little more welcoming and a little bit younger. You don't wanna go crazy with this because it will look funky. Um And we will be able to tell. Now this man is a good example of what we can do as far as cleaning up his skins or his spot removal. Some of this stuff I think can go away. So I'll hit Q I'll resize my brush here on the right. You see going up and down, it's at 100 and feathering click and it kind of does it right away and I'll hit QE off and on so I can see what I've done. Um Because as you go along, it will start to collect, right. You'll start to get a lot of these little images. Sometimes I might take these, these little divots out in the skin. Sometimes not. I'll just do it for example. So you can see um and it looks like he's got a little bit of scarring up here. Um Again, it might be also something that that's worth talking to your, to your um to your couple about like how much post editing do you want them? Do they want to be done? Um I'm not going to do a ton that looks pretty good, but then you can see these are the edits that I've made. I'm hitting Q off and on and if we hit before and after it's just subtle, right? Subtle little things that will go a long way um in your edit. Now, you can also do some skin softening so we can go over and hit a create mask, we'll go to brush and this is what I keep resetting, but under the effect, we can actually select skin, soften light skin, so soften skin straight up. I like to go skin soft and light because it's more subtle and I won't get carried away with it here. I'll show you the difference, soften skin if we bring up our brush, right. I'm using the mouse. It really softens. I mean, that's pretty aggressive. I'm gonna hit Command Z to get rid of that if we change it to soften skin light. Oh, let's go back. Where did it go? Brush? Soften skin light and I adjust my brush. It's a little bit more subtle. Right. And I kind of want to do it up here where he's got some, a little bit of rivets and bumps up here, so I can just kind of work my way down without making a huge difference, but also it's still affecting him quite a bit and you can do that under the eyes, um quite a bit if you wanted to. Um I would go back and actually use my little heel tool to get the under eye bags, um adjusted and use right under the right under where it is under the cheek to sort of blend in the same color that's not in the eye bagged area. Uh Yeah, just below it and let that sort of take away some of it. It's still there a little bit, but again, we're blending, we're healing and that's the subtle way of making it look a little better. So if we zoom out, it's not as bad, we go before and after. And actually now because of that, I feel like I need to add more texture and because it's a little too soft, so we'll go back to what we did the mask on his face. Um And you can see like this editing for me is sort of like you kind of manipulate it and work it and practice. Um If you get really good at it, you can go really, really fast and you can recognize it, but every person is different. Um Every human that you take photographs of is different and they're going to wake up with bags on their eyes or not, bags on their eyes with makeup or no makeup. Um So you kind of have to like learn how to kind of move with the flow, kind of work it and see how you like it. So let's go back to this mask and oops, we don't want to rename it. You can rename it if you want to get that detail. We're not going to be here and I'm gonna bring back some texture that looks a little bit. So we're a little bit back to kind of where we were a little bit just because it's a little much. Um He's also got some pretty, pretty gnarly bags under his eyes. So maybe let's try using a brush that we'll custom make, we'll reset it, we want the overlay on. So we know what we're doing and we're just going to select this sort of darker area under his eyes there. So you can see the overlay, what we're doing as soon as we start editing it. I think we talked about earlier, the overlay will go away and you can see what you're doing now because it's dark. I want to bring it up. But maybe let's start with color because it's kind of purple. So let's warm it up or try and get it to match his skin. We'll make it a little warmer and we'll go green. Oh, sorry. We'll go the other direction and I'm trying to basically blend it in with his skin. I'll also do the clarity and the texture just in that area. I may take away contrast because that'll make it a little flatter and I may take away some de hazing. See if we go too extreme, we see what we're doing right. And we go the other direction. We may have a black eye but just subtle, right, maybe add some texture back in because we know we don't wanna go too crazy. Um And then saturation is sort of the last thing to sort of try and find a good balance with his skin. Takes practice again, every person is gonna be different. Um This is another kind of advanced way to edit. I don't like to do that all the time unless I absolutely have to. Um but you can see when we zoomed out, it's made a huge difference and I would probably spend more time blending that into his cheek a little bit more. Um You can see how you can see the ring um as it comes out. But yeah, that's a, that's a really good place to start. I would spend more time on this, obviously, if we weren't teaching and you could go in and really kind of fix up his fix up even more there. You can even go back to that mask and add, add more. You could see how that would be the blending, blending in of more of what we had created and that's actually even better just doing that. Um So yeah, so that's our gentlemen and both those shots are, are gentlemen looking away. So let's actually go in and look and see what it would look like with them looking directly at us. This is a bit extreme, right? Going back to the sun, the outdoor highlights coming right in, they wanted to be shot in the vineyard where there was no shade. So we waited till the sun got lower. So it's a little easier to deal with and exposed to his face. Um The color is looking good. Let's go ahead and go to our uh shaded white, a little warmer, a little nice. Maybe I'll come back just a little bit. I'm gonna bring up the exposure kinda like that adds contrast, bring on the highlights to keep that suit in. Bring down the whites just a tad bring on the blacks for some contrast and you can see how warm that side of his face is because it's hitting the sun might come back down a little bit. It's, it's this one's a tricky one because we don't want to be too contrasty, but we also want it to be like warm, inviting, natural, look nice. I'm gonna add, I'm gonna take away some clarity and take away some texture because we're pretty close to his face and you get used to when you're, when you're editing these guys, you get used to what they are. Remember this little hair was bothering me. I'm gonna hit Q and get in there and kind of take that out and see how it blends away with the feathering. Perfect. I'll look for any like other aggressive blemishes. He's pretty clean. Uh As far as that goes, his, his under eye is not as bad as the other gentleman. Um So we'll go ahead and hit brush, reset it and we'll set to our softened skin light, make my brush a little smaller and just come in and just subtly. Oops, you can also move the edit like that. Um which tends to happen when you click on the actual little icon and we're just softening just, just a little bit, nothing aggressive or extreme, right? Just subtle. Um Something with this gentleman too that I've noticed is his eyes are a little dark and his, what's called the I uh I can never pronounce it, right? The Scala or Skala, you can go to select people person and right here again, all our things, but I scala you can select that specifically and I can select the Irish and Pupil everything is in the eyes, right when you're looking at a portrait. So think about that a lot, especially when they're looking right at you. That's what I want you to take away from these two photos that we're about to edit. So I want to affect both those individually and separately. I'm selecting those and I'm creating two separate masks, great masks, mask two and mask three. Now you can go in and label them. It'll also just say I Clara here. If you don't want to take the time to do that again, you have to balance how much time you're spending on editing 400 photos. So we know this is a sclera, I feel like it's a little dark. So I'm gonna bring up the exposure a little bit subtly. We don't wanna go, you know, crazy mode. We just wanna bring it up just a little bit, add a little contrast. I'll bring up the highlights, bring up the shadows just a little maybe. Uh oh, we need to reset this because it kept my edit from last time. Look at that back to exposure contrast a little bit of highlights, a little bit of shadows and they're tad tad off white. So I might bring the saturation down just a little bit to make it a little bit more white. You can counter that if you think it's a different color by changing this color. Like if we go more blue, it'll get away from the warmth from the sun. That's probably what's causing it. Um, and I'll add a little bit of clarity just because that's where we're looking at. Someone, take away some texture to make it soft. Now, you can see what the D haze does like. That's just not gonna work for us in either direction. So we're not gonna use that and then I'll sharpen it a little bit, not as much as the pupils. So now we'll go back to the pupils depending on your subject and where their eyes are. I like to brighten the eyes a little bit because it does make you connect with someone, but you don't want to go so extreme that you don't recognize a person and it's not real. So we'll add low exposure, little contrast, I'll bring the highlights up because that little reflective pin light is going to be a highlight and that'll look nice. I won't really do anything else. Maybe a tad saturation. He's got pretty dark brown eyes. So that's not going to go a long way, but I will come down and add a little bit of clarity and, and a decent amount of sharpness because again, that is how we connect with humans is seeing their eyes and seeing that they're sharp and you can see our, our, we reset here, reset and like that, obviously, we're close in. But like that is just more of a connection to this human um than not. So let's zoom back out and yeah, that's looking great. That's looking really clean, really nice. It's soft, it's inviting. It makes sense. Um I'm looking at it. There is a little bit of space. Oops, there's a little bit of right here along his eye that is peeking out. This is a really good example of how detailed you want to get with your portraits. I get a little bit more detailed my portraits. So I would probably actually go in and um see if I could heal that. It's a pretty, pretty small area. I'm pretty far zoomed in and I know it's very subtle. Most people probably wouldn't even notice neither would he. But if it's bothering you, you should probably do it. You can see the pixels, that's how close in I am. And again, I would do it kind of like the under eyes. I would just find the area that's very close to, close to it and see if that kind of goes away. Let's see if we can turn it off and on so you can see what we've done, right? It gets, it's a, it's a, it's subtle enough that gets rid of it. I'm, I'm ok with it. Again, it's probably not something anyone else would notice but myself, but you have to decide how much time you're gonna be spending on your portraits and your edits and how detailed you're gonna go into them. Let's keep cruising through here. I'm not spending as much time as I would on normal. Uh Normally on these. Um, I just want you guys to have the tools. All right. So now here's our other gentleman and he's looking right at us and we did this with, I believe the 85. Yep. So let's start with the crop. I want to make sure that his eyes are center and in the upper third just below right there. Boom. I love that photo. He's kind of got a little bit of a menacing face. Um Let's look at the color. Let's go to his collar too warm for me, too warm of a white balance. So I'm gonna bring that back just to keep him enough skin tone so that he looks alive but not a ton. Um His shirt is also not really a white shirt. Another trick that I've done before is using the the eye, the eyes to really get that like nice white tone, but in that direction, it's too blue for me. Um Personally, so I'll bring back the warmth which I think is probably in a good spot before now. He again, he's got, he's got like a decent amount of um pores and uh a little bit more of a rougher skin. So I probably would uh soften it up a little bit but not too much because we're so close. It's gonna be harder to make that effect, right? We have to be even more subtle. So the closer you're gonna get in on these portraits, the more subtle you're gonna have to be. Let's do our global edits. First, I like the exposure. Let's bring up some contrast. Bring on the highlights, bring those shadows to make it more contrast. You same with the whites and the blacks. We'll take a little bit of uh the clarity out and a little bit of the texture out. But again, we're close. So we gotta be careful. I might de haze it just a bit, adds a little bit more contrast, turn your bit of saturation and we'll sharpen it and a tiny bit of de noise. Although we're shooting at ISO 100 I don't think we need a de noise. Let's not do that. That'll soften it globally, which I don't necessarily want to do. And on this one, I might just add a little bit of a vignette just subtly just again to like target, who we're looking at. The more I'm looking at this, the more I feel like it's a little too warm on his skin. So let's start there. Let's isolate his skin will go to people person, one face skin, not a ton of body skin. So I'm not gonna worry about it this time also because the neck is separated. You can see the overlay is separated by his beard from his face. We can get away with editing them separately if we wanted to. We don't need to edit the neck because we don't really see it, but we do need to edit his uh face skin. So let's create mask, reset it because it went soft on us and I'm just gonna pull back to the blues just a little bit to make his skin tone a little bit more natural. I am gonna do the clarity. You can see the pores in his face are a little bit unflattering just a little bit, just a little bit of texture too. They're still there. We see them but they're softer, right? They're not as aggressive. And I think that that looks a little nicer. Now, if this was your style where you wanted to have like, you know, a lot of detail uh and have a very extreme face, you know, you could, but that is not what we're doing. So let's see all that command Z, command Z, command Z and we'll just soften it a little bit. He looks a little bit more ving. It's a little bit more flattering, which is the goal, right? Um Let's go ahead and now get into the healing tool. Was he a man? And let's see if we can do his under eye with our healing tool without it being too extreme. Again, we're so close. We want to be careful that we don't mess this up and I'll bring right from under his eye these little white uh reflections. I'm gonna get rid of and there's a couple of pimples here that we're gonna li to the other eye and again, I'll go right under him. This isn't something that all photographers do. This is sort of my style thing. So, you know, it's a, it's an acquired taste and there are plenty of other ways to do this. Maybe better for you, maybe better for not. But this is the quickest way I've seen. So we've gotten rid of that. Let's see. Can we look before, after, before, after now, the big thing again is because we're so close. We don't want to go too extreme. Um, but we also don't want it to look silly. We don't want it to look fake. So, um getting rid of those bags is like a nice plus. And I think I would then add another mask, a brush, reset it and I will do a skin softened skin light and just kind of go over it with that to just help blend it and help subtly be a little softer on his skin because his pores are pretty, uh contrasty and pretty aggressive. And you can see him shooting at an F two, the front of his uh brow is not in focus and his eyes are in focus and that's how razor thin the focus is. Um which again is more my style. But if you were to shoot at maybe in a four or a 56, which might be better for this more would be in focus. Um And it'd be a little bit uh easier to see his face. Um I would probably do a little bit more healing like up here around here, spend some time up here. Um But then let's quickly go ahead and look at our eyes. So like people, we'll go to person one, we'll do I Sara and Iris and Pupil and we're going to create two separate masks because I wanna edit them individually. Start with the sclera. He's actually doing pretty good. We'll bring up the white just a, just a tad to make it smooth and then let's see how his eyes are affected or bringing them up. Just, just a little bit add contrast, bring up the highlights. Mm Bring the shadows down a bit, add whites and bring the blacks down a little bit and then again, a little bit of clarity, a lot more sharpness. Let's zoom out. So it's a little softer. It might be a little too soft over his nose. I might have gone a little extreme with that now that I'm coming out and looking at it. But let's just see at our previous what we were before we were after, before, after you can see everything we did. Yeah, I think it's a little too soft on his nose again. That's just me editing while I'm talking to you. But I would probably go back in and get rid of that a little bit and take a little bit more time. You should be spending more time on these closer up photos for sure. You can see how quickly our global edits and how quickly our little uh you know, softening goes a long way, very fast because we're so close, we can see all the details. So let's go to our first female. We want to do kind of all the same things. But now we're looking at someone who's got more skin, right? We can see more uh imperfections that they may not find flattering and there's just more to edit as far as hairs, eyes. Um This particular uh madam has very large eyes and so there's a lot of emphasis on there and she's wearing a very thin um dress as far as like the straps go. So we see a lot of shoulder um is also relatively uh cold in the getting ready room. I remember that. So you can see she's lost a little bit of color in her skin. So our goal here is to make this look flatter something that she would like to share and see. Um I'm gonna go ahead and start with the crop. The crop looks actually fine. I'm happy with the crop. So we'll go with global edits. I'm gonna bring up the brightness a little bit without being too afraid of losing some details in the flowers. Flowers aren't the key here. She is. So I want her to her face to look good. I want to connect with her face. It's ok if I lose some details in the flowers personally, if I bring the highlights back, we'll get it back as you can see um a little bit of contrast. But we want to be careful also because the contrast will deepen the shadows, especially under her eyes. And we'll go ahead and do a little bit of clarity. Take away a little bit of clarity, a little bit of texture to get us started on all that. A little bit of de haze. And I'm going to add some saturation because I know I want the color in her, in her skin to look good. Well, automatically the whole thing I'm gonna make a little bit warmer um from what we were before. And that's gonna, you see how that dramatically helps your skin out. This is what we were at before. This is where we're at now. So that's already, we're already starting to pump more life into this photo. Now, let's get more locally, right? Those are the global edits. Now, I'm gonna start with her skin tone in general. And the way I usually work with these portraits, especially with the women is starting big and just getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So let's start by isolating um her skin tone person. One, we don't want to do the whole person because we don't want to change the color of the white in the dress with the flowers. We're going to do the face skin and we have to do the body skin. I think when they're connected like this, there's no beard separating the color between the two. Um, there's no jacket or anything and there's a ton of body skin. Um, we want to do it together, so we're gonna make sure they're just one mask and we'll be affecting them together because they're pretty much similar tone. So it's a great mask. We'll reset this, make sure we're good. I'm not gonna mess with the exposure. I feel like it's OK. I mean, you can see if I were to brighten it or lower it. That would be too extreme, right? We want it to be natural. Um So I'm actually going to affect the color, right? Because I want her to be a little bit warmer, right? That's pretty good. I need to bring back some life in her skin. That might be a little too much, just one. And you can really get dialed in here if you're um more by the numbers, I like to use the sliders. Um Maybe we'll make this a little bigger and now we're gonna do clarity, right? So we're gonna take away some clarity, take away some texture. Again, this is just affecting, this is just affecting her skin and then we will take away some of the de haze. So again, we're trying to soften it. We're trying to make it look a little bit more flattering than, uh, than aggressively crunchy or contrasty or dark. Uh We want to make it look a little bit more flattering. That's pretty good. Let's see. Uh, reset. That's pretty nice. So, what am I looking at now? I'm feeling like under her eyes is a little much right. We got to worry about those bags. She doesn't have a lot of pimples and whoever the makeup artist was did a fantastic job. Um Really great. Let's first uh go ahead and try our healing trick with the eye under bag eye. We want it to be pulling from just underneath and just underneath that worked pretty good. So if we go to Q, we go before and after before and after that alone does so much for her uh and is generally a lot more flattering. We can also go in and now um add our softening uh brush so our skin, our skin softening um just a little bit. She's actually looking pretty good. So I'm not super worried about it. There's a little bit of this is what happens when you have such a detailed camera. We just want to soften, you know, just a hair, just a hair, just a little bit, not too crazy because we are close and then let's go ahead and select like we had been doing before the eyes and the sclera first person high school E Irish people's two different mass. We're going to create this one's a square, we'll just bring it up just a little bit of white, just a little bit and then um bring up her eyes a little bit. She also has pretty dark, dark brown eyes, so it's not gonna go a ton of of, it's not gonna go a long way with the color, but we do want to add clarity and add the sharpness. Um just so we can see her back in there. Um That's looking pretty nice. It's a little soft on her face. Um With the mask, I might, I might uh bring back the texture just a little bit and the clarity just to, again, we're a little close and it's getting, getting fast while I'm talking here. Um Another thing that we can do with our brides that if you feel like you want to get into your style is selecting their hair and their teeth and their lips like you can go in and do every single little thing. Um I'll do the teeth if I feel like they're yellow, I'll do the lips if I feel like they're dry and they're not natural. The hair is kind of a fun thing because I do feel like if we reset this, it's sharper if we add the sharpness and we add contrast and we add a little bit of clarity. It does pop and stand out a lot more. Um And you can play around with that as far as you see, it depends again on your bride and, and how we wanna view it. Um As far as like your style goes like your style view. Um I like to add a little bit sharpness and stuff because I do think when the hair is in focus, it can really add a lot to your subject and make her pop again. I would probably spend a little bit more time on this. Uh Just for the sake of teaching, let's uh continue to move on, but the lips would be a good thing to try reset and I would make them a little brighter and then you can add a little bit of saturation just to make them a little bit more natural. And then depending on how you want to do um clarity, like you can go either way or you can add texture to it uh or clarity if you feel like you want to go direction or you can take away and it'll be a little softer. Um Again, more on the style side, I would go a little softer in general. My, my style is just natural, natural, natural, um subtle, subtle, subtle. So that's a really quick edit for her. Let's go on to a different skin tone. Also outdoors looking right at us. Here's our bride that we shot earlier. This again is a very close shot, right? It's very close and so let's start with our crop bring down and we can see the focus fall off on her hair is pretty quick. I'm actually going to crop a little bit more and we'll get right in there and let's look at our eye drop. Maybe, maybe we go to her teeth because they are so white. That looks pretty good. I'm gonna bring it, make it a little warmer. She also had a great makeup artist that we saw earlier and that's looking great clarity in general. Let's bring down texture in general. Add a little contrast. Where are we at? Let's bring it down the exposure a little bit, bring the shadows down and blacks and a little bit of saturation. A little bit of sharpening. Let's look at her eye. Here we go. We're pretty close. So this is like a tough, this is gonna be a tough one. All right. That's looking pretty good. So let's isolate her skin and we have to do face and body skin and they're gonna be the same thing automatically. It went back to our softening tool that was a little aggressive. So let's reset and we'll bring it down a little bit, bring the texture down a little bit that's nice and soft, but it's not losing who she is as a person um or looking super fake. So that's great. So then let's go ahead and we'll zoom in and try our healing to all trick just under the eye. Nice blend there and this, uh this will get easier with um, people that are younger, obviously, like we start to get wrinkles and stuff under your eyes or if you have like a good uh makeup artist, they can really get rid of it. But even that alone is uh like a big plus. So here's the, before, here's the, after some people don't like to get rid of that stuff. I just think it looks a little bit more natural. Um Or a little less tired, you have a little bit more energy in life to you. Um Sometimes it's hard to hard to notice. She's got a little bit brighter eyes. Let's go in and see what that looks like. We'll click on the iris and the eyes create two different masks. Start here. Bring it up, just a tad, go to the eyes, bring up the exposure a little bit. We don't wanna get too crazy right. If we're too crazy, they're gonna be gnarly. So just a little bit here, a little bit of contrast. Drop the blacks to make a contrast here. Add clarity and add sharpness. That's a little extreme. Let's bring the, let's bring the exposure down a little bit. All right, that's looking good. That looks pretty good. So other than maybe like coming in and really getting the detail with our, with our healing tool, with these little, these little flakes up here, we could do that or we could go in and get her um the pimples that we see. Um You can also really spend the time with the healing tool and light room and try and get out all these little hairs I would actually say to send this photo into Photoshop and use the healing tool in Photoshop because I think it's actually a little bit um stronger and easier to deal with. Um I would use the healing tool here just for the pimples and uh little imperfections that you may want to get rid of uh for them. So that's just like a really quick edit. Let's see where we were at before, man. That's what we're at and that's what, that's, that's what the edit. Pretty big difference. I would, it's funny because I look at this and I just wanna keep editing and I can spend time on these uh and find, you can find little things that you wanna keep changing a lot, but you have to know when you feel like you're good with it or when you feel like it needs an edit and start to practice and be comfortable with that. I'm just using the softening tool because I feel like it's a little, it's a little much right there. That's pretty good. So we're looking good. So let's move on. Great. So let's move on to our brides, not looking at us. This is one of my favorite dramatic edits, right? Uh Of editing because I've actually edited this photo already and I spent a lot of time on it. But let's start with the crop because we're really gonna change the way this photo looks, crop is a good place to start. Let's check the color. Maybe we'll go with the white on her dress. A little warm for me. Come back, bring it back just a little bit. That's looking nice. Then we will isolate her skin. I'm just trying to go through the repetitiveness, right? The more we get used to doing this, the faster you will become at it and the easier it will be for you to get through a full wedding and make more of your time. So we're gonna isolate your skin. We're going to bring the clarity down and the texture down just a little bit. I'm starting with the skin because there's so much skin in this photo that I want to make sure we're good there. I'm just gonna warm up her skin a little bit without changing the rest of the photo. Then we'll get out of there. Let's go back to our global edits. I'm gonna bring the exposure up a little bit contrast, bring down the highlights to save those flowers a tad, bring the shadows down a little bit to help add contrast. Same with the whites. I go up blacks down. We'll bring a little bit of clarity and a little bit of texture in. Remember we already did our skin and we will go to her eye and sharpen just a little bit and then I'm gonna add a vignette. Now, this is without doing any other uh local edits, right. We started big. So let's go, let's reset it and see what it looked like before. Huge dramatic change. Right. It went from this to that, the warmth already, the crop, the softness of her skin now is when we would go in and we would do the details in her under her eye. We would probably brighten this up, create it white. We would look at her skin tone, maybe we'd soften up her arm a little bit and really get in there and do it. But the idea is that you start big, work your way down and find the image within the image that you've taken already. I don't want to spend too much time on this. You kind of know how, how I would do it and where I would go. Um Let's go to our next bride again. She's not looking into frame. I like this crop. I like it a lot actually. And I would, maybe the reason I brought this one up is because I like to put brides near windows if we're indoors, nice and nice, soft light and I would make it dramatic, right? So I would bring the exposure down a lot, bring the shadow down, maybe hike up the highlights a little bit, hike up the whites and bring down the blacks much more dramatic than anything else. And you can really create a mood like this if you wanted to. And remember we, when we were shooting, it was pretty bright in there. I mean, if you look at the video from before, um, it's a pretty bright room and there's not like a ton of, uh, you know, dark shadows, but this is what you can create in editing big global edits right here. Let's look at the before and after look how dramatic that can be when you bring everything down. Now, I'd go into our normal edits. Right. Let's go and detect her skin, face and body because they're connected and we're showing a lot of skin and we'll bring the clarity down a little bit, bring the texture down a little bit and let's warm her skin up just a little bit, a little bit more natural and maybe de haze just a tad. Right? And then we'd go in and isolate like it's a, it's a little warm on her face. I might just bring down her face a little bit. Um I'm ok with the crop, but also I could see us getting rid of the window. So we don't actually know where that's coming from and having it be a little bit. Uh Oops, let's undo all that. Yeah. Having it be a little bit ominous like if we don't see the window and we just kind of see her body in frame, I could get, I could see an argument for that. Um This is also like a good example, if you wanted to go in and play around with the linear gradient, or you could make it even darker coming from uh the right side, right, that would be like sort of bringing in the shade and making it even more dramatic like that. So we bring just that down and you could come in even deeper if you wanted to and make it incredibly dramatic and incredibly intense like that. Um And let's just see where we started with right, like that to that. And that's just a very quick way of just emphasizing the shadows in the shade and making it more dramatic. This is a little extreme personally, for me, the bottom right corner, you're losing a lot of detail. I would maybe bring it back a little bit and have that shoulder in um just to c create some shape or keep the shape of, of the human. Um But yeah, that's a really good way and I would probably soften up a little bit of her skin and go through. Um So anyway, that is a quick way to edit some portraits. I do think that you would probably want to spend more time on these individually than the other photos. But again, keep in mind you don't want to spend too much time because you could deliver up to like 10 portraits, 15 portraits maybe you're only delivering five portraits. You have to decide how much time you're gonna spend and how dramatic your style is gonna be like this. I think a good rule of thumb is to really dive into one and make it, make it spend some time on it and then use the tools that you did that and start moving quickly through the other portraits. You can also copy and paste a lot of these edits like we did before in the faster editing. Keep in mind that you are still maybe discovering your style as far as editing goes. Um You can create your own presets, you can use other people's presets and build off of them. Um But you know, again, it takes practice. I know I keep saying that but I wanna beat that into your head. Don't get discouraged if you're, if you're just kind of going through these things or I'm moving too fast, you can always go back and re-watch, set up a laptop and or a phone, watch this on your phone and practice along with me. It's very helpful for you to be doing the things while hearing me talk, do it over, do it over and over and over again with your own photos. Um And you'll find your own way of doing these things. Not all my ways may work for you. Um In your creative eye, you may want to push it in a different direction or use a different method. Um The important thing is that you take the time to discover what works out for you. Um This should give you a good base on getting to your own style, your own edit, moving quickly and efficiently in a business sort of way. Um but also maintaining all the art. So let's move on to the next lesson.