Dodge & Burn. Well, in this case, specifically Dodge and not Burn.
In Lightroom:
1. Go over all her skin (including shoulders) with adjustment brush on high flow using the Soften Skin preset, but scale it back by half so that it's only -50 clarity and +12 sharpness. Maybe even less since she's got nice skin already.
2. Then start a new adjustment brush, start with the Dodge preset (+0.23 exposure), add some +shadows (maybe +30?) and a little more -clarity (maybe -25). Use a low flow (maybe 3/10) and medium feather, and brush it on to the areas you want to lighten and even out. If you do too much, you can hold down Alt to make an erase brush, or just click on the "Erase" option under the brush selection. If that's not doing quite enough, you can increase the +shadows a bit.
Some tips:
- Don't use Auto Mask on skin, ever. Auto Mask is generally pretty stupid. The only time I've ever found it useful, is if you're trying to be relatively precise along a high-contrast edge, you can brush way over the edge, then use Erase with Auto Mask turned on, to clean off the areas that you don't want the adjustment, and get a relatively clean edge.
- I've saved over my original Soften Skin preset with the updated (halved) one. -100 Clarity is almost always too much.
- Tap "O" to toggle the mask visibility on and off, so you can see exactly where you brushed on the adjustment.
- You can use the same instance of that Dodge brush to lighten and reshape a variety of places - after you've cleaned up the forehead, do a little on the chin too. TBH, she doesn't need much at all.
Here's a Lightroom retouch where I did something similar - I used the adjustment brush to eliminate dark circles under eyes, as well as the rest of the retouch. If you search that thread for my posts, I've put about a half-dozen portrait retouches in there.
https://photography-on-the.net …showthread.php?p=16891903
Wife on her B-Day
