Brief Summary
Alright, so, this video is all about Julia Trotti's top 10 tips for editing portrait photography. She talks about everything from cropping and tonal adjustments to color correction, skin retouching, and removing distractions. Key takeaways include the importance of balancing light, keeping skin tones natural, and making the eyes pop. She also touches upon using tools like curves, HSL, and the spot healing brush to enhance your portraits.
- Cropping to enhance image power
- Balancing light and using curves for style
- Keeping skin tones natural and eyes pop
Julia starts off by saying that cropping is super important and can really make your image more powerful. While it's ideal to get the composition right when you're actually taking the photo, sometimes things move around, and you end up needing to crop later. She personally likes center cropping and cropping in tighter to remove extra space, which makes the portraits stand out more.
Next up, she talks about tonal adjustments. She starts with the basics panel to even out the exposure and lighting. For backlit photos, she underexposes a bit to save highlight details, then brightens the shadows and exposure in editing. She also uses curves to add style, like matting the blacks by creating an S curve. This deepens the shadows and brightens the subject.
Moving on to color, white balance is a big deal, especially if you're going for a natural look. She shows an example of a photo shot in dappled light where the auto white balance made the image too cool and pink. Warming it up with the temperature slider and adjusting the tint makes a huge difference.
Skin tones are super important in portrait photography. Julia loves playing with colors, but she always keeps skin tones in mind to avoid making her subject look like an alien. You can adjust skin tones using the orange and red Hue sliders in HSL, or by clicking directly on the skin and dragging to change the hue.
The eyes are another key element. When adjusting tones and colors, make sure you're not messing up the eyes. If the eyes aren't popping enough, use the brush tool with the iris enhance preset in Lightroom to bring out more color and light. Adjusting the white balance can also help the iris look more like it does in real life.
Sharpening is great for bringing out details. In Lightroom, you can hold down the option key and use the masking slider to sharpen only specific parts of the image. Luminar Neo lets you sharpen small, medium, and large details separately.
Retouching gives portraits that final, polished look. For large batches of photos like weddings, she sticks to color and crop edits. But for smaller sets, she does more detailed skin retouching.
Keep an eye out for color casts, especially when shooting in vibrant locations. Yellow or green casts from parks are common. For blonde hair in shady areas, there might be a blue cast. To fix this, create a new blank layer in Photoshop, set the blending mode to color, and brush over the area with the correct color at low opacity.
Finally, take a look at the overall image and remove any distracting elements like bugs, stray hairs, or random stuff in the background. Use the spot healing brush in Lightroom or the erase tool in Luminar. For trickier spots, use more hands-on tools in Photoshop.
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Transcript
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0:00 hey everyone it is no secret that I love editing photos and I think editing the photo is just as important as the process of taking the photo to create your final piece of work so today I want to share with you my top 10 tips when it comes to editing your portrait photography I'm going to share tips on things to look out for new techniques you can try and how to make your portraits stand out with editing I'm going to be using a few different programs too as you can apply most of these techniques to any editing software that you prefer to use so before I touch the curves tool or start changing any of the colors in my photo the first thing I always do is look at my cropping cropping can play a huge part in how powerful your image is and I think can be a slightly underrated tool when it
0:46 comes to editing portraits while it's important to try and get your composition right in camera at the actual photo shoot working with people and hand holding your camera means that not everything is always going to be perfect I love capturing lots of movement during my photo shoots and while I try to keep my composition that I want sometimes it can start slipping or my subject moves in a way I wasn't expecting and that will leave me with images that I need to crop for my personal style of portraits I love Center cropping I like to bring up the crop tools so I can see the grid overlay to make sure my subject is in the middle I also like to crop into my photo if there is a little too much negative space for my liking I think portraits stand out more when they are cropped in
1:31 a little tighter the next tool I like to use are my tonal tools and there are two ways you can do this first is by using the basics panel or you can also adjust tones by using the tonal curve I always start with the basics panel though to even out the exposure and Lighting in the frame for example for my backlit photos I typically like to take them slightly underexposed to save some of the details in the highlights then in editing I like to bring out my shadows and exposure a little bit to brighten my subject I'll then bring down the highlights to bring back that detail in the brightest spots of the image and finally I'll bring down my black slider to add some more contrast back into the image here's a before and after of just my basic tonal adjustments the main aim
2:16 when using this tool is to balance the light in your image to give you a good base to work with for the rest of your editing and that brings us to Curves where you can further tweak the lighting in your photo and I like to see using curves as a way to add the style to your photo so look I still love matting my blacks in my photo editing I used to do it a lot more in my order work and has since toned it down a little bit but I still really love this effect for my photos to do this I like to create an S curve the easiest way to do this is to put down three points in each area and then create an S shape this will deepen the Shadows by pulling down and this point will brighten the subject when pulling it up I like to move each point a little bit at a time and slowly tweak
3:02 the curve until I'm happy with the results and let me know if you'd like to see a whole video about the curves panel including the RGB channels in curves too if you want to learn a new skill or expand on your current skills skillshare who is the sponsor of today's video is the perfect place to do that and they're giving you a one month free trial when you use the link in my description skillshare have in-depth classes on so many topics from creative writing illustration video marketing and heaps more I recently watched the creative portrait photography plan shoot and edit original portraits which takes you through the entire process of a photo shoot from beginning to end with lots of insightful tips to help improve your photography if you want to watch this class or learn new skills then the first 1000 people to click on the link in my
3:48 description will get a one month free trial to skillshare moving on to color white balance makes a huge difference in what your portrait looks like especially if you're delivering quite natural looking images with minimal editing to your client for example we can take this photo here that was shot in dappled light I was using Auto white balance for this photo because I took it for a camera review of the Sony A7 CR I'll leave that review linked down below if you want to see the rest of the behind the scenes of this photo shoot I noticed white balance was really tricky for the camera to find this photo is a little too cool and even a little too pink for my liking so Yasmin doesn't really stand out here I'm going to warm it up with the temperature slider and also bring the pinks down with the tin slider and here's a before and after this image
4:34 looks so much better with just those two settings adjusted tip number five is to keep an eye on your skin tones there are so many ways you can edit the color of your photo whether it's through RGB curves or using the hsl panel or my favorite by using the color grading panel but I won't be going through all of that today if you want some editing tutorials or ideas on how to color your images I have a whole photo editing playlist I'll leave Linked In the description where I take you through all the steps one by one today's tip when it comes to coloring your portraits is to keep skin tones in mind skin tones are so important in portrait photography and you know me I love coloring my photos and doing all sorts of fun things to the colors but I always have to keep my subject skin tone in
5:20 mind to make sure I don't end up making them look like an alien the way you can do this is by going to the orange and red Hue slider in hsl which are the two colors usually responsible for skin tones you can also click on this button here and then click on the color you want to adjust directly on your photo and drag up and down to change the Hue that way instead if you're not sure which slider to use something that's just as important as skin tones to keep in mind while you're editing portraits are the eyes of the subject and there are a couple of tips I have here the first is when you're adjusting the tones and colors of your photos make sure it's not affecting the eyes of your subject for example when using the tone curve if you are a little heavy-handed it can really start affecting the light on
6:06 someone's face so make sure you keep checking the before and after while you're editing to make sure you haven't taken your editing too far the second tip is if the eyes are not standing out as much as you would like them to you can also use the brush tool to bring out more color and bring in more light you can select the brush tool and Lightroom and then select the iris enhance preset zoom into your image and paint across both irises to enhance the colors I also like adjusting the white balance to make the iris match what they look like in real life too as sometimes the location you're shooting in can make them appear slightly different next we have sharpening and to be honest I used to sharpen my photos a lot more in the past probably because my lenses weren't as sharp as they are nowadays
6:53 but regardless I still love sharpening my photos to bring out all the details a little trick in Lightroom is that once you bring up the sharpening you can hold down the option key and bring up the masking slider which will only sharpen specific parts of your image Illumina Neo you have the option to sharpen small medium and large details as well as the overall image tip number eight is retouching and I personally love retouching my images because I feel like it gives my portraits that final finished look I don't retouch every type of photo shoot in the same way though for example a wedding or an e-commerce photo shoot where you are delivering up to or around a thousand images I won't do any intricate skin retouching instead
7:38 I will only do a color and crop edit but for portrait photoshoots or fashion editorials where where you are delivering a smaller amount of images say a set of 10 final images then I will do more intricate skin retouching and I have a beginning to end skin retouching tutorial you can watch and follow along with on my channel I'll leave it linked for you the second last thing I think is so important to keep an eye on when editing portraits are color casts you will usually find color costs when shooting in very vibrant locations the most common one you'll see is a yellow or a green cast in someone's skin from shooting in Parks another interesting one you might come across is if you're taking portraits of someone with blonde hair in a shady location their hair might have a blue cast to it to fix that
8:25 I create a new blank layer in Photoshop and set the layer blending mode to color then I take the correct color and brush over the area with a low opacity brush the last thing I do to all my portraits when I'm editing is take a final look at the overall image to see if there are any distracting elements that take away from the portrait this could be absolutely anything from Bugs strands of hair leaves discoloration and nature in the background or maybe even a person walking in the background if I see anything that takes my eye away from the portrait I like to get rid of it from my image in Lightroom you can use the spot healing brush in Luminaire you can use the erase tool or if it's in a tricky spot with lots of texture you can also
9:11 move into Photoshop and use more Hands-On tools to remove it let me know which one was your favorite tip in the comments below that you'll use next time you're editing a portrait session but as always thank you so so much for watching I make new videos every single week so I will see you all next time bye
