LIGHTROOM Tidy up portraits

Louise Carey shows you how to use Lightroom’s Spot Removal Tool to polish skin to perfection

- Louise Carey

There are plenty of great opportunities to catch beautiful portraits this summer, but if you want to enhance your images, one of the best skills you can learn is how to retouch the skin. Luckily, there’s a method I’m going to show you in Lightroom Classic CC that is fast, effective and surprisingly straightforward.

The Spot Removal Tool is a really easy way to edit out flaws. Whether your model happened to have a bad breakout on the day of the shoot, or you simply want to remove some flyaway hairs, the Spot Removal Tool can be a life-saver whenever an otherwise amazing portrait has some small imperfections. It’s just as handy for removing dust sensor spots from landscapes, for example.

The Spot Removal Tool replaces any area that you brush over with a different part of the picture that has been automatically selected by the software, although you can reposition this source area if it doesn’t look quite right. Lightroom offers two main options: Clone and Heal, which helps you control the type of selection made. You can also further refine the effect by adjusting the size, feathering and opacity.

In this tutorial, I’ll run through how you can how you can enhance any portrait by removing small flaws and imperfections.