Lightroom

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).

Tags: Adjustment Brush, Adobe, develop, lightroom, overlay, portraits, post processing, Tutorials

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 Tutorials 2 Comments

What Software Do YOU Use?

Well love it or hate the birth of digital photography means that using software as a post-processing tool has become more common than tap water even for the average joe (or julie) in the street. People either use their choice of software for simple tweaks like cropping and colour correction or they unleash the beast and use it to take a image to new levels, compositing various images into one masterpiece and letting their imagination run wild with the available tools.

Since taking up photography as a major hobby (obsession?) I’ve switched over time from mad and crazy post processing experiments to something of a lighter touch. I now try and make better use of my subjects, camera, environment, and accessories and strive to get the image I want straight out of the camera but it’s still common for me to tweak images and apply colour treatments and crops. For this reason my main post processing tool of choice is adobe lightroom. I do still have photoshop installed for those moments when I want to let my imagination run wild! So what is your software of choice when is comes to post-processing?

We are interested in what tools you use the most. There are lots of choices out on the market these days from free online tools like picnik all the way through to fully loaded costly applications such as photoshop. I’ve tried to list what I expect will be common answers to this question for you to vote on below but please leave a comment with a bit more detail of how and why you use your choice of software and also let me know if I’ve left any out.