It’s been a while since we did a post for our fellow photographers out there, so we thought we’d refer back to our handy dandy Formspring page and answer one of our recent questions right here on the bliggity-blog.

“My question has to do with post processing. I was wondered what sharpening method you use, and your secret to getting nice glowy clear skin for your brides :)”

Let’s start with skin tones – there is not a quick and easy answer for this one, but we’ll share a couple tips that may help.

ONE: Shoot in manual and exposure for your subject’s face.

Hands down, this is the most important thing in having your subjects look their very best.  A good exposure will make your subject’s face look soft and bright.  If you nail this while shooting, you wont even have to bother with a lot of post processing tricks.

TWO: Adjust the orange color slider in Lightroom.

We do 95% of our editing in Adobe Lightroom.  In the basic editing tools in the Develop module, there is a section for Color adjustment sliders.  For nearly every image we move the orange slider between 15-25 to the right (positive) side.  Since skin color generally contains orange tones, doing this will make the subject’s skin nice and bright without changing anything else about the image.  On occasion, we also adjust the red slider if the subject has more red tones in their skin.  It’s a small thing, but it makes a significant difference in giving your subject’s skin that nice, glowy look.  I”ve used this portrait of Lindsay from a recent senior session as an example.  In this case, her skin was well exposed already, so I just bumped the orange slider to 15 to add a nice glow.

To save us time in adjusting every image, we’ve created a custom preset that automatically sets the slider to 15 and we just apply this preset to every photo before we start doing anything else.  (This will also come in handy during the sharpening discussion by the way.)

THREE: Retouch with the Lightroom Brush tool OR Photoshop Healing brush.  Add the final finish with Totally Rad Pro Retouch.

For close up portraits, like the above shot of Lindsay, we retouch any blemishes, stray hairs, skin discoloration, etc.  We stick with the Lightroom brush tool in healing mode whenever possible.  Our ultimate goal is to open as FEW images in Photoshop as possible.  If the Lightroom brush tool just isn’t getting the job done, we’ll go into Photoshop and use the healing brush.  To put the final touch on a close up image, we use the Pro Retouch action from the Original Totally Rad Action set.  We don’t like our images to “look” retouched, but this action really does give the image a nice polished look if you turn the opacity of the retouch layer to about 30%.  It’s very easy to go overboard when it comes to retouching, so we really try to go easy but still make our bride’s look their very best.  Here’s the same shot of Lindsay after our final touch ups with the Photoshop healing brush and the Pro Retouch action.

Stay tuned for Part II in a few days as we share our secrets to crispy sharp images :-)  Feel free to leave any questions or comments in the comments section below.  And if you have other photography related questions for us, you can ask them HERE, on our Formspring page.