Free Lightroom Preset: CMS-Skin Softening

Before Skin Softening

I won't be blogging much today as I have 1200 wedding photos to sort through and prepare to deliver to Chris David from yesterday's wedding shoot. But I thought I would give away another preset for everyone to download and use.

Skin can be a bugger to work with, especially in Lightroom. The secret to working with skin in Lightroom is using the Local Adjustment Brush.

Skin by nature is a porous heavily textured surface that can make a photograph look soft and inviting or gritty and hard. Soft and inviting is not always what we want on men and gritty and hard is not what we want on women.

I have addressed the need for making women’s skin soft and inviting with the CMS-Skin Softening Preset for the Local Adjustment Brush.



A Closer Before Look



The image to the right is the original image that has been pushed to a near high key state. But when you look closely at the photograph (click on the photograph) you can see that the model has pores in her skin and some blemishes. To make her feel beautiful, I will smooth her skin out.

Getting a little closer in and we can see the details a little better in the image on the right (click to see the larger version of the close up).
 
 
 

To address this we will apply the skin softening preset to the local adjustment brush and paint over her skin surfaces to clean up the blemishes and pores.

Skin Softening After

In applying the brush I used the following brush attributes:

Brush Size: 6.3 through the cheeks, nose bridge, forehead and chin and a 2.3 for the upper lip and between the eyes as well as between the eyebrows and hair.


Feather: I set the feather of my brush to 52. This allowed a smooth transition between the smoothing being applied and where it wasn’t applied.


Auto Mask: Is set to off.


Density is maxed out.


When applying, do not apply over the eyes, lips, nostrils or eyebrows. Allowing these features to shine through allows the skin to look even softer in contrast to these areas without over softening the skin.



Skin Softened

 Any blemishes not corrected by the softening process can be cloned out afterwards. Like with any local adjustment brush, only apply the brush after all basic global adjustments are made.



Download Here


To install the preset, copy the file in the zip (xxx.lrtemplate) to your Local Adjustment Presets folder on your computer. If you don't know where to find this folder, open Lightroom. Click on the Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on the Presets tab and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folder... button.