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
Cropping for Impact
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.
Tonal Adjustments: Basics and Curves
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.
White Balance
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
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.
Enhancing the Eyes
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 for Detail
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
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.
Color Casts
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.
Removing Distractions
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.
