Adjustment Brush
Lightroom Quickie: Soften Skin
This tip is actually specific to Lightroom 2 – as it uses the Adjustment Brush, which of course wasn’t present in Lightroom 1. If you’ve yet to upgrade from 1 to 2, I personally think the Adjustment Brush alone is reason to do so – it’s such a versatile, easy-to-use and yet powerful tool!
Soften Skin in action with overlay
Soften Skin is one of the presets on the Adjustment Brush – and it’s quite well hidden, which is a shame as it’s a great feature!
Open a shot to work on, and go to the Develop pane, then click on the Adjustment Brush tool (the far right one of the five icons under the histogram – looks kind of like a thermometer on its side).
Once selected, a new set of menu options appear below – click on the arrows next to the current Effect to get a drop down list of effects and presets. Select Soften Skin from the list.
Now you could just go ahead and paint over the areas of skin you want to soften – but it can be difficult to see which areas you’ve selected. So instead I recommend that you press O before you start painting, as this will turn on the Overlay option, which makes everything MUCH easier! Now go ahead and paint the areas you want to soften – obviously just select skin, not hair, eyes or lips – if you go over the edge and want to delete a small area of selection, just press and hold the Alt key and paint over the area you want to delete.
Once you’ve finished your selection press O again to turn off the overlay and see the effect applied. The default full Amount of 100 can be a little obvious at times, so try lowering it until you get the desired combination of softened and natural (I find a figure of around 60 to 80 looks natural, but flattering).
