How to Edit Portraits in Lightroom Classic – Day 15

Portrait Editing Simplified

A portrait edit has one job: make the viewer look at the face. Almost everything worth doing serves that — brightening the subject slightly, calming anything that competes with them, adding a little detail to the eyes. None of it is dramatic, and the finished result should not look edited at all.

Day 15 works through a full portrait in Lightroom Classic. Every step is a mask, and every adjustment is smaller than you would expect.

Start With Auto

As ever, Auto in the Basic panel is the right opening move on a RAW file. It recovers highlights, opens shadows and adds a little Vibrance, which gets the global tones out of the way so you can concentrate on the local work.

The backslash key gives you the original at any point. On a portrait you will press it constantly, because subtle edits creep.

Fixing a Background That Competes

A bright, saturated background pulls the eye away from a face. The fix is a mask, and the way to build it is not obvious.

Create a Select Subject mask, then click the three dots beside it and choose Invert. You now have everything except your subject — a far more accurate background selection than Select Background sometimes produces, because it is defined by the subject edge.

Inside that mask you have the full set of adjustments, including Point Color. Sampling the background colour and shifting its hue lets you bring a clashing background into agreement with something else in the frame — matching a blue backdrop towards the tone of the flowers your subject is holding, for instance. The colours stop fighting and the picture settles down.

Two Radial Gradients That Do Most of the Work

This pair is the backbone of portrait editing, and it is almost invisible when done gently.

1. Brighten the face

   New mask, radial gradient, dragged out over the face and slightly beyond. Raise exposure a little and lift the shadows a little. Genuinely a little — this should be barely perceptible on its own.

2. Darken everything else

   New mask, another radial gradient over the same area, then Invert it so it affects everything outside. Drop the exposure slightly and pull the saturation down a touch.

Separately each is nearly nothing. Together they create a soft pool of light around your subject, and the eye goes exactly where you want it. Lowering saturation outside the subject is the underrated half — colour attracts attention as strongly as brightness does.

Eyes: the Brush and What Its Settings Do

Eyes are where a portrait is won. Zoom in properly first — hold the space bar to pan, and work at 100%.

Size — bracket keys, or the slider.

Feather — how soft the edge is. On skin and eyes you want this high. A hard-edged brightening around an iris is instantly visible.

Flow — how much mask each stroke deposits. Low flow builds gradually as you paint over an area repeatedly, which is what makes a blend look natural. This is the setting most worth lowering.

Density — caps the maximum strength of the stroke. Most people leave it at 100 and control everything with flow.

Paint the iris and lift the exposure slightly, with the colour temperature nudged warmer. Then check both eyes: one will usually be heavier than the other. Hold Alt or Option to switch the brush to erase and take it back, using the same feather and flow so the correction blends as softly as the original stroke.

Toggling Show Overlay reveals hard edges you cannot see in the adjustment itself.

Sharpening Eyes Without Sharpening Skin

A second brush mask, this time at higher flow, painted only on the lashes, the iris and the lower lash line. Then open Effects within that mask and raise Texture and Clarity.

Stay off the whites of the eye and off the surrounding skin. Sharpening the sclera makes eyes look glassy and unreal; sharpening skin around the eye emphasises every line and fold. The whole reason for masking this rather than using the global sliders is to keep those areas out of it.

Done properly the effect is striking at full size and impossible to point at.

Skin: Healing Brush or Generative Remove

Two tools, and choosing correctly matters.

The healing brush, inside the Remove tool, handles small things — a blemish, a speck of dust, a stray mark. Paint over it and Lightroom samples nearby skin. Fast, and the right choice at the pore level.

For anything larger — an object in the hair, something structural in the frame — switch on Use Generative AI, paint the whole object, and click Remove. It generates replacement content and offers variations to choose between.

The rule of thumb: healing for blemishes, generative for objects.

Where This Usually Goes Wrong

Brightening the face too much. A face noticeably lighter than its surroundings reads as a cut-out. Small moves, checked against the original.

Over-sharpening eyes. Texture and Clarity on the whites is the fastest way to make a portrait look artificial.

Painting at full flow on skin. Every stroke shows. Lower the flow and build.

Retouching at 100% and never zooming out. Work close, judge at fit. Things that seem essential at 200% are invisible at normal viewing size.

Forgetting the background. Half of drawing attention to a face is removing attention from everything else.

Keep Exploring Lightroom

More free tutorials on portraits and skin:

• Enhance the Subject and Background Separately
  The same separation idea, worked through differently.
• Testing the Blemish Removal Tool
  Skin retouching where subtlety matters most.
• Master Masking in Lightroom Classic
  Refining selections around hair and edges.
• How to Adjust Colors in Lightroom
  Getting skin tones right before any of the above.

Take It From Here

Nothing in this edit is a big move. A background brought into agreement, a face a shade brighter, surroundings a shade darker, eyes with a little more life, a few marks gone. The finished portrait looks like a better photograph rather than a retouched one, which is the entire point.

Tomorrow we go outside: editing landscapes in Lightroom Classic.