How to retouch a photo in Lightroom

Finally, real retouching is possible from within Lightroom. Join Colin Smith, as he shows you how to use the new healing brush in Lightroom for some powerful retouching and clean up work.

Many people use Photoshop for retouching. For high end retouching and extensive work, this is still the way to go. However, you can accomplish a lot of retouching in Lightroom. That’s right, you heard correctly, Lightroom is capable of doing to pretty good, fast retouching. This is perfect for situations where you have a ton of photos, such as events and weddings. You can easily retouch blemishes, pimple, even wrinkles. Just make sure that you don’t overdo it and make the people look artificial or worse, unrecognizable.

Retouching rules of thumb

A couple of quick rules of thumb for retouching people.

1. If it doesn’t look like it was retouched, then you did your job well. It shouldn’t be obvious.
2. Fix things that are temporary, acne, red eyes, dark bags, stray hairs, even whiten the teeth “a little bit”.  Don’t remove things that are a permanent feature such as reshaping noses and bones.

Have fun with this, and if you want more in depth training on retouching, we have some awesome stuff here at photoshopCAFE.

See this training by Jane Conner-ziser for everyday portrait retouching:
Retouching Everyone | Skin Techniques | Advanced Techniques

For a more beauty/ Glamor style for editorial, catalog and magazine, see Kristina Sherk’s training:
Fashion Retouching

Thanks for reading!
You can get Photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99 mo in the Creative Cloud Photography Program

Colin

See the full, free Lightroom 5 launch site at https://photoshopcafe.com/lightroom

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One response to “Advanced Healing Brush in Lightroom 5 for retouching”

1. To be honest the tutorial is so exclusive for me as i learned many things from it.

   Reply