How to Soften Skin in Lightroom

Learn how to use the Soften Skin Brush in Lightroom with Yanik's Photo School.

Hello everybody, Yanik Chauvin here for Yanik’s Photo School, and this is the second tutorial that I’m doing for Lightroom 2, I never thought I would do that many, but I’m just loving this software everyday that I play with it, there’ a new wow factor in it and I just have to share this with you. Now I want to thank Ricky Lane from the website, who actually pointed out in the comment of the first tutorial, that there is actually a skin softening attribute to the adjustment brush, that it’s kind of hidden, if you don’t really know about it, you won’t actually find it. So I want to thank Ricky for that and I’m going to share this with you today because I tried it out on a few images and it actually works amazingly well on skin. Now let’s just go in and do this. Alright, here’s a lovely shot of a model that I took during the Calgary workshop, her name is Jackie, excellent model; now what we need to do first of all is to zoom in, we want to see this 100% and see the effect that it has on the skin, so I’m going to zoom in to the skin here, and I’m going to click on the Adjustment Brush, shortcut K, and when you look at the panel, it’s soft, you see that you can adjust 7 different things: exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and color; but there is something else that you can do, if you go here and you click on this, a sub-menu appears, and you have your seven things here but there’s also another one here called Soften Skin, click on that, and as you can see here it adds negative clarity and positive sharpness, so it’s a combination of both. I tried using the Shift or Control key and selecting more than one, but that doesn’t work, so that one is a pre-set. Now let’s go for it, it puts it by default at 100 and let’s see what it does at 100; I’m just going to paint in here, I’m just going to paint what we see on the screen, that won’t go into much detail, just so we can see a nice before and after here, reduce the Brush size here a little bit, go up and underneath the lip, we don’t want to soften the lips up and a little bit on the nose, a bit between the eyes, we don’t want to go on here, eyebrows, forehead; now let’s see if we missed anything just by hovering over the black point here that it created, I can see where I missed some, so let’s just go back in here, a little bit on the nose here, how are we doing? That’s pretty good, I’m going to cover the nose here a little bit too and there you go, let’s look at the before and after. Before and after, it still retains some poreness in the skin, now if you find this over done, again, this is the mask, just like any of the other 7 functions, you can go and with the slider here you can reduce it until you find an appropriate level for your satisfaction. Before and after, so I like it at around 59 for this image; and there you go, a nice little jam hidden in the depths of Lightroom that I’ve just revealed to you. I hope you enjoyed this quickie tutorial and we’ll see you soon, ba-bye.