I also brushed over some darker areas that were missing detail, and pulled the local Shadows slider up slightly. I started by brushing over brighter areas that were competing with his face, and darkening them slightly using the local Exposure and Highlights sliders. So, I used the Adjustment Brush to draw more attention to the subject, especially his face, and less attention to other areas. Using the Adjustment Brush, I made changes to luminosity, saturation and sharpness in targeted parts of the image:ДЄdjustments to Luminosity вЂ“ Your eyes usually gravitate towards the brightest areas of an image. Make local adjustments using the Adjustment Brush The shirt is still too blue in my opinion, but IвЂ™ll target that in the next step.

In this case, I reduced Saturation to -10, and Vibrance to -5. Here are the results:ДЇor my portraits, I always make an initial global reduction (applies to the entire image) to Saturation and Vibrance. The Clarity slider focuses on the mid-tones while mostly leaving the luminosity of the brighter and darker areas of the image as is. This varies by image, but in this case I moved it to +60 in Lightroom, in order to accentuate facial features. While I removed some contrast at the outer ends of the spectrum, I then added contrast into the midtones by pushing up the Clarity slider. Notice in the image below that the light area in the background is somewhat less distracting, and that there is more visible detail in the background shadows. This was intentional, as I planned on building contrast back into the image. These initial adjustments gave the image a flat (non-contrasty) look as a starting point. I then moved the Shadows and Blacks sliders right (only a minor adjustment to Blacks) to make sure detail can be seen throughout the image, even in the gentlemanвЂ™s hat. I moved the Highlights and Whites sliders left (only a minor adjustment to Whites) to reduce some of the highlights (bright areas) in the background. The image is fairly contrasty, but weighted more towards dark tones. One of the first steps was to reduce the overall contrast in the image using the Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks sliders. First, here is the image right out of camera. LetвЂ™s look at the work I did in Lightroom for the above portrait, shot in rural China. This article assumes that you already have some familiarity with the menus and tools in Adobe Lightroom or Bridge. If you also like portraits that look a bit surreal, my hope is that you will learn a technique or two here that you find helpful. Rather than go through my entire workflow, IвЂ™ll focus on five steps in Lightroom that form the foundation for my portrait processing. I achieve some of this look by lens choice and composition and the rest in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

Personally, I like creating portraits that look somewhat surreal.

Just read the comments below a posted image that is somewhat heavy on processing and you will see the variety of opinions out there. Everyone has their own unique preferences regarding post-processing. While part one discussed equipment, composition, lighting and posing, this article focuses exclusively on post-processing. This is the promised follow-up to my article on Creating Compelling Wide-Angle Portraits Using One Off-Camera Flash.

Stylized portraiture