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Retouching Blemishes

Lesson 4 from: Lightroom for Portrait Photographers

Kristina Sherk

Retouching Blemishes

Lesson 4 from: Lightroom for Portrait Photographers

Kristina Sherk

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Lesson Info

4. Retouching Blemishes

Lesson Info

Retouching Blemishes

So let's talk about the spot removal tool. That's gonna be something you guys are probably going to be very familiar with especially if you're dealing with portraits because not only are you using the spot removal tool for blemishes, you're using it for fly away hairs, you're using it for lint on clothing. So this is something that you'll definately need to need to, to learn a little bit about. So what did I say? Q is going to bring up our spot removal tool. Alright, so there's some stuff we need to, kinda fix here. So I'm going to start with my spot removal tool on heel and we have our size and our feather and our opacity. Let's start with our opacity on 100% and let's use our bracket key to make our brush really small and let's just start to get rid of stuff. So you can see that you have the area that you told Lightroom to fix and then you the area that Lightroom is pulling the information from. Alright, if for some reason you don't like the area that Lightroom, not Photoshop if you ...

are not happy with the area that it picks you can click and drag that area to an area that you think might be a little bit better for that. So that's the first way to change your area. The other way to change your area is your forward slash key. It's going to cycle through different areas of sample to apply a better result to the area that is being fixed. Does everybody get that? Now if you're like, "How can I see this? "How can I see what's being fixed "because of these stupid pinpoints and lines?" Alright, what is a quick thing to hide your, what is a quick key for hiding that excessive, those annoying things right? H, hide. Okay, perfect so you can see that immediately there it's much easier to see that fix and then also if you wanted to keep looking at different fixes for that, for that hair it's easy to cycle through those. So let's go ahead and rid of some of these other annoying things. I love the shapes that you can actually create here. For some of this stuff. The other thing, sometimes I'll just pull my mouse over which will hide those as well. If I'm looking for a better result. Alright, so when I'm happy with something you can just hit the return key and that's going to accept that change to let you move on to the next thing that you want to, want to address. So let's get rid of a few of these little blemishes. Alrighty, so to preview the work that we've done, let's go ahead and before and after. So you can see how we've gotten rid of the hairs and we've also used the same tool to get rid of the blemishes as well. So, let's move on and let's see what we can do with the clone, the clone portion of this tool. So if we switch over to clone, we're still at 100% opacity but let's come over here and go under an eye area and let's get rid of some of that under eye bags. So, that's really, really strong and I don't like the area that it's pulling the information from so I can click and drag and get a better sample area. But that's not all I'm going to do. Better sample area. That's not all I'm going to do. I really don't like that it's at 100% because I don't think it looks very good so I can always pull down the opacity of that one brush stroke to make it look much better and more realistic okay? So that's the nice thing about these three, these three sliders right here is that you can always find something that's gonna work the best. Okay, so the other thing that I just want to talk about really quickly is the difference between clone and heal. So let's talk about cloning. Cloning takes, just bear with me for a second. If I'm at 100% opacity, there we go. Cloning is going to take the color and the texture from where you sample and put it where you're painting. Okay? Now, the difference with cloning and healing is that if we switch over to heal and we do the same thing. Healing is going to take the texture from where you're sampling but it's going to try and incorporate the colors of the surrounding area to make it match the area where it's being placed a little bit better. So can you guys see the difference between the two tools? Okay, cool so let me get this crazy third eye business out of the way here. Alrighty, your shift plus T key is going to toggle in between your clone and your heal brush. So that you can easily access the two, two tools differently, or at the same time. You can access them easily. Alright, so what else do you guys see that needs to be taken care of? I see a blemish here. Get rid of this. Hair right there. And so in this situation, I'm gonna just want to sweeten this spot up and kinda show Lightroom exactly what I want the fix to look like. So you, a lot of people don't think that you're able to heal over an area of contrast. So let me show that again. So I'm healing over an area of contrast and most of the time you'd end up with something like this. If you're working in Lightroom or Photoshop okay. This is good for both, this tip. As you can see you're seeing a lot of bleed in the area where the, where the edge is and that's because if you look at what Photoshop is using for its reference area the reference area does not have different tones and it doesn't have that edge. So how would it know to actually incorporate that edge into the heal? Alright, but if we go ahead and just hover our mouse and give, give Lightroom the information it needs in order to make a better result all of a sudden you're getting a much more realistic, realistic fix from this tool. Okay, so these tools are smart but sometimes they just need a little hand holding from you. Alright but obviously you can heal over areas of contrast. So keep that in mind as you're moving forward.

Class Materials

Free Bonus Material

Brush Preset Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Cheryl Jones Schindler
 

This is an excellent class. I have covered over half of BenWilmore's complete guide to Lightroom, which I needed as I have mostly played around with the obvious sliders in Lightroom until now. So fortunately I had a little familiarity with brushes. This is so helpful for me to now use what I learned with more detail and more skills specifically for portraits of my family. I am so excited to use all this! Thanks!!!! She is an excellent teacher.

Lesa Wright
 

I very much appreciated Kristina's energy and concise instruction. She was very easy to follow and remained focused on each lesson without being repetitive or random. I learned great time saving tips that will not be difficult to implement. Thank you, Kristina!

Stacey Feasel
 

This was a fantastic, easy to follow course! So glad I took it!!!

Student Work

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