 Hey everybody, it's Craig back to hear it in this video. I'm going to share 10 tips with you to instantly improve your portrait retouching. Now make sure you stick around to the end because I have a bonus tip 11, plus I'll walk you through a before and after image. All right, so tip number one is to calibrate your monitor. So why would you want to calibrate your monitor? Now the main reason is so you can have accurate skin tones, accurate brightness levels and accurate color. You can't have that if you don't calibrate your monitor which brings us to tip two. So tip two is to shoot in raw if you're not already. And the reason for that is it'll give you more latitude and post and you can also adjust your white balance after the fact which brings us to tip three, adjust your exposure first. So whether you're using a lightroom, capture one, Adobe Camera Raw, adjust your exposure first, which brings us to tip four, then adjust your white balance in your tint. Now it doesn't matter what you shot it at, if you're in raw you can shoot it at 5,600 and if you're outdoors, if you get home and you think it looks better at 52 you can do that. So adjust your tint so that the skin tones look accurate. So the white balance first, then the tint, get accurate skin tones. So I suggest doing it by eye because we intuitively know what skin tones look like, adjust your skin tones by eye, which brings us to tip number five. All right, tip number five is to heal skin in Photoshop. So I've used Lightroom, I've used capture one, you can't beat the healing brush in Photoshop when it comes to retouching skin. So clean up all your blemishes using the healing brush in Photoshop, that's tip number five. So tip number six is after you've healed the skin do a dodge and burn layer and make sure you add a black and white adjustment layer above that. Now the reason why you wanna do that is so you can see the dark areas of the image and the bright areas of the image. Now this first round of dodging and burning, I just go over the dark areas, I bring them up, I even out the skin tones and then I do a second layer of dodging and burning without the black and white layer and then I adjust adjust by eye. All right, now tip number seven is once you've done a couple layers of dodging and burning, then you can soften the skin only on female subjects and only a little bit. So don't get carried away with skin softening plugins like portraiture and if you do any skin softening in Photoshop, make sure you scale it back. You wanna make sure you keep that texture in the skin so their skin doesn't look fake. So make sure if you're doing any skin retouching and you soften the skin, just don't go crazy with that. All right, so that brings us to tip number eight. Now the eyes are very important. So you wanna sharpen and brighten eyes. Tip number eight, sharpen and brighten eyes. But again, don't go crazy. Just add a little bit of a curves layer, bring up the brightness a little, add a little sharpness to the eyes, have a look at it and then probably scale it back a little bit so that it looks authentic. All right, that's tip number eight. All right, so tip number nine is to either darken the background or add a vignette because you really want your subject to pop. Now you don't wanna go crazy with this. What I'll normally do is I'll cut my subject out and then maybe I'll add a curves layer and darken the background only so my subject pops or maybe I'll add a little vignette but just do a little bit just so that your subject stands out in the image. That's the reason why you wanna either darken the background or add a subtle vignette, which brings us to tip number 10. Tip number 10 is to add subtle color grading at the end of your retouching. So for example, you could add a levels layer and you can add a little blue to the shadows or a little yellow to the highlights. So develop your own color grading style so that all of your images have a signature look to them which brings us to bonus tip 11. I've mentioned this in a few other videos. Make sure you set up a rating system for yourself and rate all of your images as they come in. Pick maybe a four star rating. You can do it in Lightroom or Capture One. The reason for this is you only wanna edit your best images. So let's say you take a hundred, narrow it down to your top den and then narrow it down to your top one or two. Only retouch those images and then only post those. That's an important tip. All right, so let's have a look at a before and after image and I'll walk you through some of the things that I did to this image. All right, so here we are in Capture One. That's what I used to process my raw images. You can also use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. So this is the raw image right out of camera with no adjustments. So all I did to this in Capture One was I adjusted the exposure slightly and then I went over and I adjusted the temperature. So you can see this was shot at 5,500 Kelvin. That's with a K and I think I lowered that to about 53 and then I exported that to Photoshop. So I used all of the tips that I shared with you in this video. I did some exposure adjustments, some white balance. Then I did some skin healing. Then I did some dodging and burning. I sharpened the eyes. I did some liquefying the hair. That's another bonus tip. And then I did some color grading. You can see I added some blue to the shadows. I also brought out some more of the red in the skies and I darkened the background a little bit to make her pop more on the scene. So I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. If you'd like to see me put a step-by-step retouching tutorial together for this image where I walk you right through the whole retouch, I'll tell you what I'll do. If I hit 500 likes with this video, 50 comments, then I'll put that video together and I'll walk you through step-by-step all the adjustments in Capture One that I make and then all the adjustments that I make and all the adjustment layers in Photoshop. So all's you gotta do is like this video, share this video and comment. When I hit 500 likes and 50 comments, then I'm gonna release that retouching tutorial. All right, let's get started. Share this video, like it, leave a comment. All right, if you found these tips helpful, give me a thumbs up for this video. If you're not already a subscriber, hit that subscribe button. If you wanna share this video on the web, just look below. You can click on Share. You can share it on Facebook or photography groups, forums, wherever you'd like. Also, I'd like to hear some helpful tips that you use in your portrait retouching. Just post a comment down below. I'd love to hear from you. All right, thanks for watching this video. Remember the thumbs up, hit subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.