How to Retouch Portraits With Masks In Lightroom

Lightroom Classic’s new AI powered masking tools make it easier to retouch portraits than it ever has been. Today I’m going to show you the basics, with a link to the photo in my Adobe Community profile so you can practice the techniques yourself.

Before we start, it’s worth thinking about the style in which you’d like to retouch your portraits. Do you prefer the slick, airbrushed look common in a lot of commercial photography? Or you prefer a more natural, authentic look? If it’s the latter you’re in luck – Lightroom Classic’s tools are perfect for this style of portrait retouching.

Here’s the portrait I’m going to retouch in this article.

And here’s the result after retouching.

This isn’t a difficult portrait to retouch, and I selected it because it’s an easy one to practice with. You can view and remix this photo on my Adobe Community profile.

If you’re new to Adobe Community that means that you can view the photo and use the Remix feature to develop it your own way in Lightroom desktop or Lightroom mobile. You can also download the settings as a Develop Preset to use with your own photos. In other words, it’s a great way to practice what you’re learning.

Click (or tap) here to view the photo in Adobe Community.

I’ve used Lightroom Classic for this demo, but you can also do it in Lightroom desktop, Lightroom mobile, Lightroom web and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). The layout of the sliders is different, but the tools are the same.

Portrait retouching workflow

You can divide the task of retouching portraits into three steps.

1. Retouch blemishes. This is simple and doesn’t take long.

2. Stylize the portrait. This is where you decide what look to apply to the portrait. It’s not as difficult as it might sound. You need to set White Balance and Profile, then adjust Basic panel sliders like Exposure, Shadows and Highlights. You might also use Develop Presets.

3. Make local adjustments using the masking tools (including skin smoothing). This is where the magic happens and your portraits come to life.

Let’s take a closer look at the retouching process to see how it works.

Step 1: Remove blemishes with the Remove tool

The Remove tool is for removing blemishes. The healing algorithms used by Lightroom Classic preserve skin texture. Here’s how you do it.

1. Click on the Remove tool icon to activate it. Make sure it is set to Heal, not Clone or Remove.

2. Adjust the size of the brush using the square bracket keys (‘[‘ and ‘]’) on the keyboard.

3. Click on the blemish you want to remove. Lightroom automatically selects another part of the portrait to sample and heals the blemish.

4. If Lightroom Classic doesn’t pick a good area to sample from, click and drag the circle showing the sample area (marked with an arrow, below) to an area of unblemished skin.

Step 2: Stylize the portrait

In this case I stylized the portrait by setting the White Balance and Profile.

Step 3: Local adjustments using masks

This is where we get to the exciting stuff. Local adjustments can transform your portraits from ordinary to special. Lightroom’s AI powered masking tools make it easier to retouch portraits than it ever has been.

Create your masks

It’s often helpful to create your masks in advance. You can also create masks as you need them. But for a simple portrait like this I can see that I need four masks – one for the model’s face, another for her eyes, a third for her hair and one for the background. That’s because these are the regions that need local adjustments.

Those four masks, once created, look like this in the Masks panel.

Create them by going to the Masks panel and clicking the Create New Mask button. Choose Select People, which opens a panel showing an icon for each person in the photo.

Click a face to see the Person Mask Options for that person.

There are ten masking options. I selected three (Facial Skin, Iris and Pupil, Hair) and checked the Create 3 separate masks box to make three different masks. You can choose as many of the masking options as you need.

Lightroom creates a new mask for each option you selected. They look something like this.

Lightroom names the masks Mask 1, Mask 2 etc. When you click on a mask the panel expands to show you the component masks. Each mask is made of at least one component mask. You can add more component masks using the Add and Subtract buttons (or the Intersect button, if you hold the Ctrl key down on a PC or the Alt key down on a Mac).

Learn more: How To Intersect Masks In Lightroom Classic

The screenshot above shows that Mask 1 has one component mask called Person 1 – Facial Skin.

It’s a good idea to rename the masks so it’s easier to see what each one is for. You can do this by double-clicking a mask name and entering a new name. Here’s what my masks look like after renaming them.

Next I created a background mask by clicking the Create New Mask button and choosing Select Background. I then renamed it Background. Again, you can create as many masks as you think you need.

Make local adjustments

The next step is to make your local adjustments. It doesn’t matter what order you make them in. You can work your way through the masks one by one, or jump around as you like. In practice you’ll often go back and forth between masks, tweaking your adjustments until you’re happy with the result.

It helps to think about what you want to achieve before you apply local adjustments. For this portrait I’m going to apply a little skin smoothing, add Clarity to the model’s hair to make emphasize texture, do the same to the pupils and irises of her eyes and make the background darker.

Let’s break that down so you can see the specific local adjustments.

For the Face mask, I went to the Presets menu and chose Soften skin (Lite). This applies a subtle skin smoothing effect by adjusting the Texture and Clarity sliders. The default setting was too strong for me, so I set the Amount slider to 37 to reduce its strength. The final settings were Texture -35 and Clarity -15.

Then I moved the Shadows slider left to darken the shadows under the model’s face.

For the Eyes mask I set Clarity to 48 to bring out their texture, and Shadows to 91 to brighten them (applying Clarity made them darker).

Use your judgment when applying this to your portraits as it’s easy to go too far and create an unnatural effect.

Next I went to the Hair mask and set Clarity to 24 to emphasize the texture of the model’s hair. This is a subtle adjustment. Every portrait is different. Again, use your eye to judge the result.

Lastly I went to the Background mask and moved the Highlights and Shadows sliders left to make it darker. I usually adjust Highlights and Shadows rather than Exposure as it gives a more subtle effect. I also reduced Contrast.

Here’s the Before (top) and After (bottom) versions again so you can see the difference made by those local adjustments.

If you’re new to portrait retouching using masks then hopefully this article has inspired you to give it a try. It’s great fun to go back over old portraits and see how you can develop them better with more advanced tools.

Don’t forget you can view and remix this portrait on Adobe Community. Next week I’ve got two more great masking examples to share with you. And below you can see some information about my newest ebook Mastering Masks.

Mastering Masks

Lightroom’s masking tools have changed the way photographers develop photos forever. My newest ebook, Mastering Masks, teaches you how to create stunning photos using masks and local adjustments. It covers all the latest tools and techniques covered, plus there are fourteen Case Studies for you to follow along with. 

Click here to learn more or buy