How To Create Colorful Portraits

THE BEFORE

So excited to walk you through this edit. Here's what we're starting with. 

CURVE ADJUSTMENT

The first thing I like to do is start out by brightening the image by doing a quick little curve adjustment. 

HUE/SATURATION ADJUSTMENT

The next thing I want to do is adjust those greens. I do this by doing a Hue Adjustment, turning it to GREEN. This will change the color of only the greens (I like making them more of a seagreen). 

Then I switch it to the YELLOW hue and move the slider over a little bit to make the yellows more green. This way the yellow grass blends with the other green. 

Important: you can see how that also changed the skin color, be sure to mask back anything that's yellow in the image that you do not want to change the color on.) 

COLOR BALANCE ADJUSTMENT 

To add a little warmth to it I'll do a quick color adjustment to add more reds which will warm the whole image.  

CURVES ADJUSTMENT 

This time instead of making a curves adjustment on the entire image, I'll only mask it by the trees and sky. I want to bring out that light a little more. 

VIBRANCE ADJUSTMENT 

In this portrait I think a little extra vibrance would look beautiful. An easy way to do this is to do a Vibrance adjustment and just slide the slider a little more. Once that's done I simply masked away on the subject. Keeping her skin tone not as vibrant as the natural colors around her will insure that her skin tones will look natural. 

COLOR ADJUSTMENT 

After all those adjustments I wanted to add a tiny bit more red into her skin tone and warm up the trees a little bit more. Added a bit of red and masked away anything that I wanted to keep cool. 

BOKEH BRUSH 

Used the Bokeh Brush Set (brush #2) to add a little more detail and contrast to the background. The brush is really easy to use, once it's installed just click on it, make a new layer, make the brush white and start painting. (it will add little bokeh spots everywhere while your painting it.) Then all you need to do is turn it to 'overlay' at 50% opacity. 

SHARPEN

To finish the image I added a little bit of smart sharpen to make sure everything was nice and crisp. 

Hope you all enjoyed the tutorial. You can create these same steps in photoshop, elements and even lightroom. 

LOOKING TO SPEED UP YOUR EDITING PROCESS AND CREATE CONSISTENT WORK?

If you are then you'll love the Lightroom Preset Adeline Collection. They bring out highlighting colors and contrast, mixing two elements that compliment one another in every portrait with just a click of a button!