Hey guys, Chelsea here and today i'm going to show you how to enhance the
eyes and hair of your subject in Lightroom. I'm really kind of warming up
to Lightroom, I usually do a lot of things in Photoshop but I read Tony's lightroom
book,
he's pretty good, he's good. I may be biased, but he's good. And I've been
picking up some tips and some tricks and applying them to my own photo so I
figured I'd show y'all.
We'll go on a journey together and we'll edit this picture of Aja.
So let's start by selecting this adjustment brush here and... there we go,
and we'll press O on the keyboard and then it shows you a mask of your brush.
So I'm going to make my brush bigger by using my right bracket on my keyboard
but you can also use the size slider here.
I like to just use right bracket because then you can put it over what you're
trying to select and just see what an appropriate size is. So this doesn't have
to be a really clean selection, you can use the erase tool after and clean it up
but you can see that her hair is really just, kind of the texture is lost in the
shadows and I really just want to make it pop.
She has really beautiful hair and I want that to be more prominent in the picture.
Come around this side here
see some, I think there's some hair going on over there and then these little
wispy parts.
I'm not going to attempt that now, i'll go back to that when I'm touching things up.
And now press O again to make your mask go away and I'll raised my exposure and
my shadows. And i'll raise my highlights a little bit too just to make her hair
look a little bit glossy. You don't want to do it too much or else it starts
to look like she's wearing a wig and that's not cool.
Okay, so let's bring the color temperature up because in person her hair is
actually a bit more red than it photographed and i'll bring the tint to
the warmer side as well. So that's pretty subtle, let me press Y and we can see a
before and after.
It's a pretty big difference. It's subtle, it's natural, but it adds to the picture
i think. You have all this green and then in contrast you have these red tones and
I think it looks beautiful.
So i'm going to select a little more hair and make my brush smaller with my
left bracket and get some of these little pieces here.
Her curls, I noticed, weren't as defined in this area.
So I just, I don't really want to accentuate that, so I'll go to my erase
tool and i'll bring the flow to about fifty percent and then I'm just going to
make those a little darker.
That was actually a little bit too much, so I'll go to my brush and i'll bring
the flow down and I'm going to bring it back up a little bit.
So that looks pretty good, you can fine-tune
yours and go in and add or take away.
Let's press new here and that makes a new adjustment layer. So if you don't
press new and you start making more edits it's going to edit the part where
your mask was for the hair,
so you have to press new and then you can start editing something else. And in
this case, that's going to be her eyes.
So i'll make my brush smaller again with my left bracket,
I'm going to press O so I can see what I'm doing. And I have to turn my flow up.
I'll turn it up to about eighty percent.
Ok, and again this doesn't have to be perfect because I like to go back with
the erase tool and neaten it up.
it's so difficult to edit the eyes and a picture and make it look natural.
I see so many pictures and I think that's one of the things that I always
notice is that you just keep editing little by little and then before you
know it, like the person has scary halloween eyes or something. I don't know
how it happens but it always seems to happen.
Ok, so now i have my erase tool selected and the flow is at about fifty percent
and i'm going to just start blending it in here because this part of the iris
will be in shadow a bit so you don't want to be as bright as the rest of the eye.
The brightest part is going to be across from the catch light,
so about here will be the brightest. Here will be the brightest and then you kind
of just want to blend it up into the shadows.
And you want to make sure there's none on her, on your subjects, eyelids or anything like that. And that
looks pretty good. So I'll press O and then i'll bring up the exposure.
I'll bring up the shadows a bit. She has really nice dark brown eyes, but i'm just
going to change them for this picture to match all the other colors. So I'll warm up
her eyes... oh, actually I'll cool them and go towards the green side and give her some
green eyes.
So if you bring up the exposure too much they're going to really fake, so
you've got to find the right balance
I'll bring up the highlights a bit too and then i am going to use my erase tool
and just bring down these parts that got a bit too bright to make them look more
natural.
That's better and I'll use my brush
and just select a little bit more of her eye that I blended away because it looks
a bit dark to me. It helps me sometimes to just zoom out and see what's going on.
I'll bring my exposure down a little bit and I think that looks pretty good.
Another thing that I like to do is go in and just increase the clarity a bit in
the eyes.
So let me select again a new adjustment brush layer and we'll go to clarity.
Let me press O so i can see where i'm selecting. I'll get some of her eyelashes,
I'll get her iris, her eyes. Let's get this whole thing.
So, let's see. We don't
want to bring out too much. And then i'll use my erase tool and sometimes the
sharpening can kind of like make the highlights peak.
All right, i'm going to select another layer and I want to bring up the whites
of her eyes. So i'm going to use the dodge tool here.
You can press O if you want a layer mask or a mask, rather.
See, I'm in photoshop mode.
If you're a messy Bessie like me you've got to go back and clean it up
People always ask about my Wacom tablet and this is the Wacom Intuous and I
love it, but it's not necessary. Like, Tony's a mouse person, I don't know
how he does it, he's really good with the mouse. But as someone that loves drawing
this just seemed so, it feels really natural.
Okay, press O again and just bring up the exposure a little bit.
Alright, let's take a look, i like to zoom out and see,
make sure it looks natural. And if you click on your brush here then all those little
dots go away and you can see it. Let's press Y and we'll see the before and after.
So it's subtle, but the green eyes definitely go well with the red hair and
the red hair pops against that green background.
one thing that I notice is that there's quite a bit of detail in her forehead
here, so mostly this lesson is about bringing out the hair and the eyes
I'm just gonna make some other general edits too, because why not.
We're here we may as well. So let's press the adjustment brush again and we'll go
into the effects and i'll go to soften skin.
Ctrl + zooms in and then if you press the spacebar you get this little hand
here and you can drag.
I touched up this white makeup in photoshop before too, but i don't know
what i did with that file.
Okay, so if you find that it's too softened and it's starting to look a little bit
unnatural,
you can just bring up the clarity a little bit. So I think that looks a
little bit too softened, so I'll just go up to about -75 here.
So I'm gonna press new again and i'm going to do a bit of dodging and burning.
So we'll do dodge first and you can see that the exposure is just up a little
bit. And dodging is nice because you can contour the face or
if you want to bring out your subjects hair some more like I did, you can just
go over the highlighted areas here. She has curly hair, so you just kind of brush
everywhere that there's a natural highlight and it can just make the hair
seem shinier.
If I press O you can see where I'm working. And I might actually want to just reduce the flow a
little bit so it's not so harsh.
Okay.
And then I'll make a new dodging layer and i'll do a little bit of contouring
on her face.
So press I'll O again. And when you're doing contouring you want to get everywhere
that there would be a natural highlight. If you're a woman and you do make up, if
you're into makeup, you know how it works. You want to bring out here, the
cheekbones a bit. Let me make my brush a bit bigger and softer. The tops of the
cheekbones, the chin.
It should be subtle otherwise it can look really artificial, so I will bring it up
just to show you.
You don't want that. They start to look like wax. You got to be careful.
And now I'll make a new layer and I'll go in and do some burning.
And once again, it kind of works like you do contouring with makeup.
You want to burn in the hairline a bit.
Let me press O so you can see where I'm going, and in the natural shadows of the
cheekbones, you can kind of follow the shadows that your subject already has on
their face just to kind of naturally highlight. If people, a lot of people have
the thing where like they don't have a chin, Aja has a nice chin, but you can just
kind of darken underneath to accent the chin a bit more.
I'm just pressing ctrl + and ctrl - to zoom in and out. And then
alongside the nose will slim and define the nose too.
And you could use it in the hair too if you want to bring out some of the curls
again or accentuate your subjects hair you could just go into the shadows and
deepen them a little bit.
Let's press O and see how this looks
if you do it too much the person looks like a creep, you just want to very
slightly add shadows.
Now if during any of your steps you go and you look, let's do the Y and do the
before and after.
If your subject is starting to look too artificial or scary or waxy you can just
go in and you can undo some of your edits and i'll show you how. So let's
press Y again and get rid of the side by side you can go into your adjustment
brush and let's say I think... I don't know, I messed up the highlights in the hair
or something, or the burning. You just select that point, it showed you what it was,
it was the burning. And then you can adjust it. Or the eyes,
you select it, that showed me that that was the eye whitening, and I can go in and
adjust it. So let's see, that's the hair,
I'm very clear about what's going on, and if I think that I need to increase or
decrease the exposure i can go in and fine tune it.
That's pretty much it. Let's look at the before and after. I think that it added a
lot of pop to the photo it was easy it's pretty fast and a lot of fun. So I
included a picture file down below and you can download it and edit alongside
me if you like.
Thanks so much.