But if you’re after a modern, edge look, you’ll need to take a different approach.Īnother consideration is the relationship between character and beauty. While you can discover some interesting effects and color treatments this way, it’s not as productive as applying certain effects with a specific goal in mind.įor example, if know you’d like to create a portrait with a vintage look, you can apply a color and tonal treatment that is typical of vintage style photos. It’s too easy to aimlessly push sliders around in Lightroom or apply Develop Presets without a specific goal in mind. Portrait retouching mistake #7: Not having a plan Keep it subtle – you can see the difference in these portraits. Then, (if you’re using Lightroom), apply the minimum amount of skin smoothing required with an Adjustment Brush. It’s conventional to apply skin smoothing portraits of women, but it’s also important to retain skin texture and avoid the plastic skin look. There’s usually no need to apply it to portraits of men. Don’t do this with your portraits!Ī better approach is to first decide whether skin smoothing is actually necessary. Portrait retouching mistake #2: Too much skin smoothingįor reasons I don’t understand photos of people in movie posters are often so over-retouched that the actors are barely recognizable. In this case you could use an Adjustment Brush to create a mask that covers the dress and increase Vibrance (which gives a more subtle result than Saturation) a little. At first you may think that your portraits don’t pop, but with a little time you’ll appreciate the more subtle approach.Įxtra tip: In the portrait above you might decide you like the saturated colors of the model’s dress but not her skin. Tip: If you’re accustomed to using saturated colors it will take a while for your eye to adjust to using less saturated hues. The colors are much softer and the model’s skin has a much better color. The result is that the colors are deeply saturated and the model’s skin looks unnatural.įor the second (right) I set Profile to Adobe Standard and Vibrance to -10. For the first (left) I set Profile to Camera Landscape. The two portraits below show you how it works. Subtle changes in the region of -5 to -15 usually work best.
Another is that the commercial world is full of over-retouched portraits, and it’s natural for photographers to imitate that style. Part of the problem is that applications like Photoshop are so powerful they let you do too many things that you shouldn’t (there’s a simple solution for this I’ll discuss at the end of the tutorial).
I’ve seen photographers make the same portrait retouching mistakes over and over.
0 kommentar(er)
