 Today, I'm going to show you how to smooth skin inside of Lightroom. What's up, photo nerds? Today, I'm going to show you how to smooth skin inside of Lightroom. A really cool technique. But before we do that, today is Wednesday. And Wednesday means it's Photo of the Week Day. So we're going to take a look at this submission brought in by Steven Purdy. And the reason that I chose this picture is because it's really cool use of thinking creatively. Looks like they're using some sort of smoke bomb. But the way they've got this umbrella positioned, the smoke is kind of creating this mushroom to the side, which I think is really, really cool, different, unique. I love the pose, the expression, I love the colors. Another thing to note here is if we're thinking complementary colors, reds and greens really look cool together. So that really balances out this photograph. Nice job, Mr. Steven Purdy. If you are someone who wants to participate in our Photo of the Week, be sure to follow us on PhotonerdsUnite on Instagram and tag your pictures with PNFL so we can see what you guys are up to. And maybe you'll get chosen for next week's Photo of the Week. Now let's jump in to Lightroom. So today, I want to talk about smoothing skin. Now there's a feature built into Lightroom that you may or may not know about, and it's basically a preset that comes with Lightroom. So if I were to take this image and jump into the develop module, I'm going to show you what most people do, and then I'm going to show you what I do. So what most people do is they jump on over to the adjustment brush. And then here inside the adjustment brush, just to the right of the word effect, you're going to see that there's a dropdown menu here. And if we go all the way down to the bottom here, you're going to notice some presets. I've got some other presets built in here, but these presets right down here. Iris Enhance, Face Soften, Soften Skin, Teeth Whitening. These come automatically with Lightroom when you install the program. You don't have to do anything to get these. All you just need to know is where to find them. So if I choose the Soften Skin, it basically is going to go ahead and dial in all the settings necessary to soften the skin. And then what people typically do, if I zoom in here, this girl's skin is already really beautiful. But if I were to just go in here and start brushing on parts of the skin, you'll actually see this skin get nice and soft. I'm not going to waste your time by going over her whole entire face, but this is usually what people do. Trying to avoid touching things like the lips or the eyes, because at the end of the day what the skin softener tool is doing is it's actually blurring the skin. So you don't want to blur the textures on the lips or the eyes or things like that. You kind of want to steer clear of those things. So I'm going to go ahead and just reset these settings back to zero. Instead, what I like to do is use a technique that we've used several times here on the channel, which is basically going to use our Auto Mask feature to help us make a selection of the skin and then apply the skin softening to that selection. So let's start by grabbing a nice large brush here. So I'm going to go away highs. Something large enough where the radius of my adjustment brush covers the entire face. And then what I'm going to do is make sure that my overlay mask is turned on. You can do that by hitting the letter O. I'm going to set my feathering of this brush to somewhere around 50, just so it's somewhat soft. I'm going to make sure flow is at 100 and density is at 100. And then what I'm also going to do is make sure that the Auto Mask button is turned on. And now that I've gotten all of that set in place, I'm also going to make sure, again, that the skin soften or soften skin option and these presets is chosen. So once all this is set and ready to go, the rest is pretty easy. All I need to do is go and make a selection of the skin so that this will apply. So if I go and I click on the skin, what's going to happen is because I have the overlay turned on, you can actually see where her face has been selected. And right now, it's pretty blotchy. It's not all over the place. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to this control point here. And I'm going to move the control point around. If for some reason you don't see your control point, it could be because the point's got turned off. And to activate that pin, all you have to do is hit the letter H. H stands for hide. So if your pin is hiding and you hit H, it'll actually bring your pin back. So what I'm going to do is just keep moving this pin until I see all of the skin on her face actually turn green. So now she looks like the mask from Gin Carry. I know it's kind of weird, but this tells me what's been selected. Now, if I turn the overlay on and off, you can see that some of this has gotten on her hair and that kind of stuff. I'm not really worried about that. For right now, I've gotten exactly what I need. So I'm going to just kind of move this around until I see that all of her skin is nicely selected. Now, I can notice on her nose area that right here on the bridge of her nose, some of this has not been selected. So what I'm going to do is make my brush a little bit smaller, something like this. And then I'm going to just go and click on that part of her nose so that that gets included. And I can also notice that there's a very small spot on her cheek that hasn't been selected. So I'm going to grab that. So for all intents and purposes, maybe even this little spot on her chin, I'm going to go ahead and grab that. So everything on her face now has been selected, but you'll notice it's done a fabulous job of staying away from her eyebrows, her eyes, even her eyelashes are being left alone. The opening of your nostril here and her lips, none of that is being touched. And this is exactly what I want. You can notice even the hair that's across her forehead is being left alone. And to make selections like that, inside of Lightroom is almost unheritive. So what we're going to do now that we've done all of that is hit O to turn our overlay mask off. And if I just click on this little toggle button right here, you can kind of see the before and after of what this has done to smooth the skin. And it's done a really nice job of getting rid of those blotchy kind of highlights on the skin, but it's still a little bit too strong for my liking. So the last and final thing that I'm going to do as it relates to the skin soften is I'm going to go all the way up here to this little black button. I've talked about this before. This is kind of like an opacity slider. I'm going to click on this tab and it's basically going to collapse all of the adjustments down. And it's going to give me an amount slider. And the amount slider is going to allow me to dial back how strong this skin softener is. So if I just start to take this back just a little bit, I can control how much softness is being applied. So I think I'm going to bring this for this photograph down to about 60. It's going to vary from image to image, whether you're on this image or if you were using a different image, it's the amount of skin softness is going to depend on your particular photograph. So exercise your judgment. But if I toggle this adjustment on and off, we can see what a nice job of softening the skin it did, helping with all that blotchiness, but it stayed away from the hair and any of that stuff. Now, as a very last final, if I turned the overlay on and I saw any of these areas that got included like where her hair is or maybe I want to take the softness off her ear, then all I would have to do is click on the erase and get rid of these parts so that none of that part of the photograph is being softened. So I'm going to just take the softness off the ear and off the hair. And maybe I even got a little bit on her wrist right here. I'm going to get rid of. I can go on this side of the hair and erase that as well. So if you get a little bit of overspill, you can always go in and kind of modify that a little bit so that it looks exactly the way you want. And you're not softening something that shouldn't be softened. But the idea of this is to use this automask feature, which I've talked a lot about on this channel to make a selection of the skin. In a previous video, I talked about using this technique to dodge and burn the highlights and shadows. But in this example, I'm actually using this technique to soften all of the skin on the face, but do it in a very controlled way. And this is something that not a lot of people, if any, are talking about. So hopefully you enjoyed this tip and found it useful, especially if you do a lot of portraits or pictures of family and friends. This tip right here is going to come in extremely handy. So use it, let us know what you think of it in the comments down below. Give us a thumbs up. And as always, thank you so much for your support. We will catch you in the next video on Friday where we bring you our Friday quickie. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram. That's all I've got. Have a great day, everybody.