In this professional portrait photo editingin Photoshop tutorial, I will tell you how you can quickly turn photo. I will discuss a lot of quick tips and tricks that I use in Photoshop, that will help you in editing your photos in Photoshop.
So, I have opened up the RAW photo in Camera RAW Filter in Photoshop. If you don't know how to open up a JPEG Photoin Camera RAW, then you can just open up your image in Photoshop and apply Camera RAW Filterfrom the "Filter" Tab to your image layer and it will open up in Camera RAW Editor. I took this photo of Reah with my elder brother'sCanon 5D Mark III along with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens in my studio. You can follow her in Instagram.
So, the White Balance of theimage is slightly cooler. Specially in the Highlights. Let's correct that with the White BalanceTool. Let's pick this white dot to sample. This is like telling Photoshop that, thispixel should be white and Photoshop will try to fix the White Balance accordingly. I will further adjust it to my taste withthe sliders. Sometimes it's a good idea to increase thesliders a lot and then dialling back to find the sweet spot. You can apply this trick to any of the sliders. You can always double click on any of thesliders to reset to default. So don't shy away from experimenting. Now, I will try to increase the Brightnessof the image and flatten the Contrast quite a bit. We will add Contrast later. This is kind of a trick to virtually increasethe Dynamic Range of the image. Let's counter the Highlights with this WhitesSlider. This is the extreme highlight range of theimage.
We can also play with the Clarity Slider andsee if it is doing any good. In most cases, specially for beauty portraitslike this, I usually don't use this slider. But, in this case, I think keeping this tosomewhere around 30 is helping the image to pop a bit. You can also decrease the Clarity to negative5 or 10 to smoothen up the skin. But, she has pretty good skin and we can dealwith the skin later with some advance techniques. Ok. The Exposure Correction is done. You can see the before and after. A lot of detail is revealed. And along with it a lot of noise is also introduced. So let's do the Noise Reduction. I don't use the Sharpening process here andlike to sharpen my images as a last process in my edit chain.
You can also zoom in the image to see theNoise Reduction properly. You can crank up the Luminance Value quitea bit in images like this, because it can make your image a bit soft, which in thiscase is not that bad a thing, rather it will smoothen the skin a lot. But for images, where a lot of detailing ispresent, I won't recommend to go past 50. You can counter the Luminance with the LuminanceDetail Slider, which will bring back some of the minute details from the image. You should use these two sliders in conjunctionto find a proper balance of noise reduction without loss of sharpness. But, in this image, I don't mind losing minutedetails which are most likely to be skin imperfections. Bringing up the Luminance Contrast Sliderwill make the transitions natural.
I don't like Color Noise, so I like to reducethe Color Noise a lot. Now this is the portion where the magic willhappen. The HSL Tab. Or the Hue, Saturation and Luminance tab,where you can target specific colors in your image to change the vibrance and brightnessor the color altogether. In studio portraits like this, where the backgroundis monochrome and you do not have much to do with that, you need to create contrastwithin your subject. In this case, we will try to create some colorcontrast with complementary colors, pink and teal. I will try to change the color of her lipstickto more of a neon pink and will complement that by changing the color of her top moretowards cyan. So I target her top with the Blue Slider andforce it towards cyan.
Let's increase the Saturation a bit. You can subtract the warmth from her skintone with the Orange Slider. In most cases, the skin tone resides in theOrange and Yellow range, depending on the light. I will increase the luminance or brightnessof her skin to create focus on her face. Let's decrease the other colors to createcontrast. Let's check the before and after. Already you can see a huge difference. Now, you can use Split Toning for a more magazinelook. You can see the difference. You can also apply a bit of Dehaze to addContrast. Let's go back to the Exposure Tab and finetune some of the settings before opening up the image in Photoshop for further adjustments. Now you can see what we have done to the imageso far only inside Photoshop Camera RAW. You can apply the same techniques and do alot more in Lightroom also. Now, let's open up the image in Photoshopand quickly do the retouching.
I will clean the stray hairs and also theblemishes with the Healing Brush Tool. I'm sure you know how to properly use thistool and if you don't, then just let me know in the comment section below and I will makea tutorial specially for you. The healing process is done. Let's do the Frequency Separation for the skin retouching. For the sake of this tutorial, I will showyou a quick and dirty way of Frequency Separation that gives fast and effective results whenyou are in hurry. I will not recommend using this techniqueif you are doing this professionally for a client as this can sometimes give you unnaturalresults and would suggest you to take your time in the Frequency Separation process.
What I am doing here is, I have duplicatedthe LOW Layer and will blur it till the skin color looks smooth. I have set the Keyboard Shortcut for the "LastApplied Filter" to "Command + F" for my Mac and using that to quickly apply the filter. For Windows, you can set it to "Control +F" or anything you prefer. I have intentionally overdone it and willdial it back later on. Now hold the Option Button for Mac or theAlt Button for Windows and click this Add Mask Icon to add an Inverted Mask. Now with the Lasso Tool and a Feather of 20pixels, I am quickly drawing on the skin to isolate it and filling it up with White toreveal the smoothened skin. I am using multiple layers of that to controlthe amount of smoothening with the Opacity Slider in different parts of the skin. You can check the before and after. The skin is looking much smoother and alsonot looking absolutely plasticky.
Here you can be done with the skin smoothening. But, let me add a Skin Glow. Flatten the image with Shift + Command + Option+ E for Mac and Shift + Control + Alt + E for Windows. This will create a new layer with all theprevious adjustments. Let's apply Gaussian Blur to the Layer. A lot of Blur. Then change the Blending Mode to either Overlayor Soft Light. To minimize the effect add a Curves AdjustmentLayer and add a Clipping Mask to it which will make the Adjustment Layer affect onlythe underlying layer. This will also increase the Contrast a bitalong with making the skin smoother. Now, I will do the Dodging and Burning Process. For the sake of the length of this tutorial. Before finishing the edit with some minorLevels, Colors and Vibrance Adjustments and as a last step, Sharpening with the High PassFilter and done.
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