Skin Retouching In Lightroom Classic (Mitch Lally)
Photo stats: Sony A7 IV, 1/640 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100, 35 mm Sigma Art prime
Initially, the photo he worked on was already close to done without any adjustment. He adjusted exposure and white balance slightly before working on blemishes.
To “soften” the face, Mitch created a mask using the AI-detected face mask that seems to pop up automatically in the masking panel. Modified the initial mask by subtracting anything spilling into the eyes and eyelashes. Subtracted eyebrows and shadow/edges around the base of the nose and nostrils.
Once the mask was set, he adjusted the texture of the mask. He tends to set it near -50 or -60. Other settings he may adjust are decreasing sharpness and maybe clarity; both should be used sparingly, especially clarity.
For removing blemishes, he the content-aware healing tool.
Shortcuts:
- hold
spacebarfor panning within the masking mode - select any healing circle. Hold
cmd. Draw a box around a part that you want the healing tool to sample pixels from.
How To Fix And Correct Orange Skin Tones In Your Photos Using Lightroom Classic
- try to get the white balance correct in the camera
- use manual white balance
- use a color card
Depth of field (DOF)
$$ DOF \approx \frac{2u^2Nc}{f^2} $$
where $u$ is the distance to the subject, $N$ is the f-number or f-stop, $c$ is the circle of confusion, and $f$ is the focal length of the lens.
The f-number is the ratio of the len’s focal length to the entrance pupil diameter. Increasing the f-number is called stopping down. This decreases the amount of light entering the camera. The amount of light changes by the square of some factor, since the area of the pupil depends on the square of the diameter.
Most lenses use a geometric sequence corresponding to different integer powers of the square root of two. Therefore, changing the f-stop to adjacent f-stops in the sequence will increase or decrease the light intensity by a factor of two ($f/2.8$ to $f/2$ doubles the amount of light).