Skin Smoothing with Lightroom 4 '/h1'

When it comes to editing portraits in Adobe Photoshop's powerful sibling - Lightroom - there are few tools as important for achieving professional-grade results than the ability to smooth out blemishes and imperfections on a subject's skin. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how you can use Lightroom 4's arsenal of tools and techniques to achieve an absolutely flawless finish.

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Step 1: Prepare Your Image

Before diving into any kind of heavy-duty retouching work with Lightroom or indeed Photoshop itself - it is essential that your starting image has been properly prepared. This means ensuring the levels are balanced, white points have been set correctly and noise reduction techniques such as those found within Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) have been applied where necessary.

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Step 2: Use Retouching Tools

Once you've got a solid foundation to work from - it's time to start really getting hands-on with Lightroom. To access the retouching tools themselves, simply head over to 'Retouch' located at the top of the main interface panel and click on either 'Spot Healing' or 'Clone Stamp'.

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Step 3: Apply Skin Smoothing Effects

With your subject's skin looking as smooth and wrinkle-free as possible using these basic retouching tools alone - it's now time to really take things up a notch with some more advanced techniques. For this, we'll be relying on Lightroom's powerful 'Skin Smoothing' effect.

To access the Skin Smoothing panel in Lightroom 4:

1) Go to 'Develop' at the top of your main interface.

2) Click on the 'Retouching' tab located along the left-hand side of the Develop module.

3) Within this section, you'll see an option called 'Skin Retouch' - click on this to reveal its various sub-options.

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Step 4: Fine-Tune Your Results

Once inside the Skin Retouch panel in Lightroom 4:

1. Use the sliders at the top of the dialog box (from left-to-right) to adjust:

a. 'Strength': This determines how much effect will be applied overall - reduce for a subtle, natural look or increase for more dramatic results.

b. 'Radius' : Controls the size and softness of the retouching brush; lower values produce smaller, more precise edits while higher ones create larger areas being affected at once.

2. Use the Brush tool (circled in red below) to target specific areas you'd like to apply this effect too - simply click-and-drag over these regions with your mouse or trackpad to see them automatically smoothed out accordingly based on your current settings within each slider above!

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Step 5: Export Your Finished Image

Finally, once happy with the results of all your hard work in Lightroom (and remember - practice makes perfect!), it's time to export your finished portrait. To do this:

1) Go back up through the main menu bar until you reach 'File'.

2) Click on 'Export' from here.

3) In the resulting dialog box, choose a location for saving your final output file format (such as .jpg or .psd).

4' Set any additional export options such as resolution and color space according to your needs before clicking the green 'export' button at bottom right corner.

And that's it! With these simple yet powerful techniques up your sleeve - you'll be able to create stunningly smooth, wrinkle-free skin in Lightroom 4 like a pro. Happy snapping everyone!!!

Skin smoothing lightroom 4