7 Next you can turn to the darker tones in the shot. Pushing
the Shadows slider to the right for a value of about +40
injects more light into the darkest tones and helps to reveal
more detail. By pushing the black value to about +10 also helps
lift the darkest tones for a much clearer image at this point.9
One final adjustment at this stage of the edit is to boost
the Vibrance value a little to about +20. Vibrance is a more
subtle way of boosting the more muted colours in the image
first. In the case of a portrait, too much saturation could result
in bright orange skin that would look unpleasant.10 The blemishes are next using Spot Removal. You can
choose from Clone or Heal. Cloning is a straight copy of
pixels from one area to another whereas Heal uses sampled
pixels similar to the area you are trying to remove and blends
the new sample attempting to match colour and brightness.11
Subtlety is key to blemish removal and it is worth taking
your time over this next part. Your Heal brush needs to be
set to Feather 100 and Opacity between 75 and 100. Your brush
size will depend on each blemish you remove. You can alter the
brush size up or down by tapping the [ and ] bracket keys.12
With your Heal brush, click over each blemish in turn. Each
click will sample another area over the top of the blemish.
You just need to methodically click over each blemish in turn
and keep going. You will see a build-up of brush marks that
indicate each place a healing brush has been applied.8
Once done, you can go to the Presence panel and actually
reduce the Texture value to about -10. This reduction in
contrast and detail helps to soften the image, which is a helpful
and flattering thing to do for female portraits in particular. Male
portraits allow you to push Clarity in the opposite direction.136
GOING FURTHER: LIGHTROOM PROJECTS
BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22