How to edit your portraits to make them pop.
So this lesson was requested by one of my students and I think it's very important I'm going to be doing
a practical example about how to take any portrait photo and make it really pop in Lightroom.
So I'm going to show you how to take a photo from this to this.
There's a huge difference between these photos.
The edited photo really pops the color, pops the lighting, everything about it.
So I'm going to jump right in and show you how to do this.
OK, so here we are in Lightroom and we've got our photo ready to go.
And it's a pretty good photo, but, you know, it looks a little bit too desaturated and kind of flat.
So what we're first going to start with is the light tab.
So I like to just start with light and then go to color and then effects.
So let's go ahead and start with light.
I'm going to open that up and then we're just going to play with the exposure a little bit, maybe make
it a tiny bit brighter.
We're going to bump that contrast up.
I think contrast on portraits looks fantastic.
So we'll do maybe like a plus 23.
And then the highlights, we actually want a little bit of highlights in there instead of going the
other way, because that's going to kind of flatten it out, we actually want to boost those highlights
because it looks really good on her face and then the shadows are actually going to bring those down
again.
A lot of contrast on these photos of portraits is better.
If you go this way, it's really going to bring out those shadows and it's really happy looking.
But we want this to look a little bit.
Moutier, we're going to bring those down just a tiny bit.
And that's all we really have to do in the light tab.
Now we'll move over to color.
And then first things first is just to bring up the vibrance, so the color is going to pop a lot more
with the Vibrance tab.
And remember, I use Vibrance because it's a smart form of saturation.
It's only going to bring up the colors that need to be brought up and it's going to leave the other
ones alone.
If you just do saturation, then it's going to kind of blow out your whole image with too much color.
So we're going to do a little bit of vibrance like that somewhere in the middle.
And you can already see the difference in the color.
Whenever I do the before and after, I can even bring it up just a bit more.
A lot of vibrance is good here.
Now, I'm also going to go over to the mix tab, and I want her red lips and her hair to really pop
a lot, so I'm going to go over to like the orange might even have to do yellow.
We're going to go over to orange.
We're going to pop that a little bit.
So that's going to affect her skin tone a little too much.
So let's actually try yellow.
Kind of pop that, so her hair popping a little bit more with that.
So let's do that, bring the yellows all the way up and then I'm going to go over to the reds and I'm
going to bring her lips up just a little bit more.
Like that.
And then I'm just going to click on Done and then let's go over to the effects.
And then you can play around with the clarity, so if you want more of a chiseled look, you can do
that, it looks pretty good.
But I think I want to go with a little bit of a softer look.
And I'm going to be really subtle because if you go all the way here, it looks really broken and doesn't
really look very good.
So this is about normal.
I'm going to do just a little bit of softness, maybe just like that, like a negative 15, 16.
And then I'm going to add the vignette, and this is probably one of the most important parts of making
a portrait pop, so I'm going to bring the vignette in just like that to kind of close in the sides.
And it really draws your eye towards her and makes her pop because there's no black actually being put
on top of her.
So just kind of draws your eye in, which looks really nice.
To do something like that, and then I'm going to go over to detail.
I'm going to bring up the sharpening just a bit, maybe like a quarter of the way like that.
And then just like that, this photo looks so much better.
So here's what it was before.
You can tell how flat it really was before and here's where it's at now, which looks so much better.
And then when I could just do is go over to the three dots up at the top, right.
And then create a preset.
And then I'll just call this the portrait preset.
And then just click the check mark.
And then I can apply that to any of my portraits, and this helps if you're editing lots of different
photos of the same person.
So if I were photographing this girl, I would take probably 50 different photos and then I would just
pick my favorite ones and apply that preset.
OK, so now that you know how to make your portraits pop, let's head on to the next lesson.