When you think of the word retouching, Photoshop is probably the first program you think of. And retouching in Photoshop can often times be a super time consuming process. Thats because Photoshop was designed to be a really powerful process intensive program able to provide you with the tools to manipulate a photo to your imagination’s little heart’s content. Of course, Lightroom is much less known for its retouching abilities but don’t discount it. Even though Lightroom is a program designed with your workflow efficiency in mind, it also has some really cool retouching options.
Retouching Photos in Lightroom
I remember when I was first told about Lightroom. It completely rocked my world. It was 2008, and I was smack-dab in the middle of an internship with the great Sarah Barlow (I bet you you’ve seen her work) when she introduced to Lightroom for the first time. The ability to quickly and easily color correct my images was a game changer. Up to that point, I’d spent countless hours scouring the internet for tutorials on how to retouch, color correct, and otherwise manipulate photos.
When we think of retouching photos in Lightroom, we want to think of retouching in the lighter sense of the word. Because Lightroom is designed to speed up your workflow and not so much for heavy retouching (like Photoshop), if you have an image that requires heavy retouching its still better left to being retouched in Photoshop instead of Lightroom.
If you’re like me however, and have a bunch of portrait sessions, a heavy workflow, and images that only require light retouching, Lightroom can be more than sufficient. Here’s how.
Local Adjustment Tools
Lightroom offers an entire array of tools for retouching our images. They’re considered ‘local’ because they only effect one portion of the photo rather than the overall image that the sliders we’ve all come to know and love within the Develop module would normally effect.
I use all of the local adjustment tools for various reasons on a regular basis but the two I use most often when it comes to retouching are the Spot Removal tool and the Adjustment Brush tool.
The Adjustment Brush tool is very reminiscent of Photoshop’s Brush tool while the Spot Removal tool is very similar to Photoshop’s Healing Brush tool. They look similar and they work pretty much the same.
Both tools have adjustable feathering and hardness, so you’re able to fine tune the effect you’re wanting to achieve very easily.
The Adjustment Brush
When you click on the Adjustment Brush, you’ll notice a new panel opens up that looks really similar to the ‘Basic’ panel within the Develop module, and you’ll see a lot of sliders that are the same as the sliders within the Basic panel such as Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Contrast, etc. You’re able to ‘draw’ on your image with the adjustment brush, then use the sliders under the Adjustment Brush panel to achieve whatever effect you’d like.
Combining options such as decreasing clarity and raising exposure, you’re able to achieve a skin softening technique.
You can mix and match settings to create different effects. As well as skin softening, here are a few more settings to help enhance or retouch your images with the Adjustment Brush:
Eye Enhance and Sharpen:
Eye Whitening (the whites of the eye) & Teeth Whitening:
Spot Removal Tool
Probably the most straightforward of all the Local Adjustment Tools (besides maybe the Crop tool), the Spot Removal tool is really simple to figure out. When selected, you’re able to click on a section of your photo to remove any spots or blemishes. Lightroom automatically tries to select similar pixels near the spot you’ve specified to ‘heal’ it.
This tool is almost seemingly too simple but there’s definitely more than meets the eye when it comes to the Spot Removal tool. With options that allow you to click and drag your mouse over a large or oddly shaped area, you’re given almost as much versatility with the Spot Removal tool in Lightroom as you have with the Healing Brush in Photoshop.
The only big disadvantage to the Spot Removal tool in Lightroom is the more you use it on an image, the more CPU power it uses. And we’re talking A LOT of CPU usage. This is why I said at the beginning of the article, Lightroom is better left for light retouching and Photoshop is better for the heavy lifting.
Check out this tutorial below to see how I retouch my images with Lightroom and enjoy a much shorter retouching process in the future!
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