Lightroom practice

http://ariannasphotography.tumblr.com/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ariebelle/

If you have a tumblr or a flickr go hit me up and give me a follow <3 p="">
Yesterday I decided to take some pictures of my face, nothing new there. But something new I learned just yesterday is how to make my eyes stand out a ton! Now its no surprise that I edit my photos, I don't feel like I need to pretend that I don't. I love editing pictures, and I love discovering all the cool little tricks that make a photo pop even more.

So here are the pictures I took. I'll show you some before and after pictures and tell you how I did it.

Before

After

As you can see, I still look like the same person, unlike with some magazines that edit the models so much they don't even look the same. I really only do a few things to my photos. I do the basics - increase exposure, change the tone a little depending on if it needs more blue or less blue, and increase the contrast. 

What I just learned how to do in Lightroom made my pictures even better. Because at least to me, my eyes are my favorite feature of my whole face and body and with the new trick it brings them to the forefront of the picture. Along with making my eyes pop I also learned how to smooth out my skin in Lightroom as well, which is something I already knew how to do in Photoshop, but since I've moved I only have a laptop- a fairly inexpensive laptop I might add, so I don't think photoshop would run very well on this machine. So I bought and downloaded Lightroom- which is like photoshop but just for photography. 

So if you are a photographer, and you need a program to edit pictures I would highly suggest Lightroom. It is easy to use, and very user friendly even if you are a beginner and haven't had any experience with a professional program.

Okay now on to my Lightroom Tutorial.

First off you want to import your photos into Lightroom. You do so by clicking on import on the bottom left hand side of the screen.

after you have imported your photos you want to click on Develop on the top side bar.

Now that you are in Develop you can start making your photos look just the way you want them to.

Light room is very easy to use, you use the sliders to adjust the different components of the photo to tweek it in just the way you want. As you can see, I have increased the exposure and the contrast as well as making the shadows darker. 

To soften skin, there is this cool little brush tool that you can see at the top right hand corner of the previous picture.

Click on that brush tool and this tool box will pop up

You can see that to the right of effect: it says soften skin. You can click on that to change the brush settings to many other preset brushes, or you can click on custom to make your own preset. 

When applying the brush, go to the bottom left and click 

This shows you were you have used to brush in red. 

When you are done, click done and the effect will have taken place.

To edit eyes, you click on the brush, click where it says soften skin or any of the other preset names and find "Iris Enhance" 

You will then want to zoom in on the eyes to fill in the entire Iris with the brush(make sure you can see it in red by clicking Show Selected Mask Overlay)

Click done with finished and poof, your eyes will stand out more!

Look at these before and After photos!

Hope That made sense!