Radiant Photo has a range of retouching tools built in to quickly edit and improve the appearance of portraits. These tools are useful for adjusting the appearance of eyes, lips, skin and can even adjust face contours and eye size.
Radiant Photo always starts with smart editing: When you first open a photo in Radiant Photo, it applies the Smart Preset best suited for the photo. Once you’ve finished making any adjustments in the develop settings tab of the Detailed Edit panel, move into the portrait editing tools. Let’s have a look at what’s in there.
Fine-tune face selection when retouching faces with Radiant Photo
All of the photos I am working with here have been opened as RAW photos in Radiant Photo, no other editing applied. Radiant Photo also works well as a problem-solver within your existing workflow. For example, if you use Lightroom Classic then you can edit in Radiant Photo to solve specific problems like noise. If you use Mylio Photos, you can similarly bring your edits into your Mylio Library as display copies.
When you start working in the face retouching panel of Radiant Photo you will see that the face is auto-selected. If you need to adjust, you can do this with Face Selection. The Manually Add Face button lets you add a face. Helpful for images where the face isn’t automatically detected.
The tickbox Show & Adjust Control Points will let you fine-tune where features are positioned. Usually, I only need to adjust control points when adding catchlights to fine-tune where they fall.
Retouching eyes with Radiant Photo: Enhance, enlarge and more
The Eyes panel under the portrait tools has powerful options. Eye Enhance ups the contrast and sharpness of eye details and works very well. Like all settings in Radiant Photo it’s customized to the image so even if you turn it up to the max it still looks appropriate for the photo.
I added Catchlights here and tweaked the control points slightly to get them exactly where I wanted them. Auto Red-Eye is a useful setting to turn on — it will correct red eye only when needed, and not, when not. That’s one of the great things about Radiant Photo: You can turn on a setting for all your photos and relax knowing that it’s only going to make changes to images that need it.
Eye Enlarge is an interesting option in the Eyes panel. This does what it says: I’ve exaggerated the effect by turning it up to 100 for the below image. Applied subtly I think this creates a nice look.
We also have Dark Circle Removal and, as I noted before, Catchlights: These offer a selection of different catchlights to choose from. Outdoors, Beauty Dish, Ringlight, Softbox and Umbrella are all catchlights that can be added to your subject’s eyes.
Retouching faces with Radiant Photo: Face tools
In the Face panel we have three commonly used tools for retouching faces: Face Contouring, Teeth Whitening and Lip Sharpening.
Face Contouring changes the shape of your subject’s face, narrowing the chin more or less depending on how you tweak the settings. This has obvious applications for helping your subject feel more confident in front of the camera! But it’s also useful for portraits where you have selected a focal length that’s not ideal. For example, shooting a portrait on a very wide focal length. Contouring can help you bring it back to a more natural-looking portrait.
Teeth Whitening, arguably, should be turned on for every portrait?! Teeth just aren’t white. At least, most teeth aren’t. The strength of this setting is easily adjusted as needed, as is Lip Sharpening. You can choose from Fine, Medium and Coarse for lip sharpening and use the slider to adjust within each range.
Retouching skin with Radiant Photo: Remove problems instantly
The Skin tools are powerful. It’s possible to go from subtle improvements to a complete makeover in just a few clicks. Smooth works on either Face Only or the Full Body, depending on selection. I generally choose Subtle for here; there’s also Default and Super Smooth when needed.
There are three powerful automatic removal tools in here as well: Blemish Removal, Infrared Removal and Shine Removal. I find the Shine Removal in particular very useful. Before Radiant Photo, I would manually paint and mask (and sob and rock in a corner) to remove shine in Photoshop. Radiant Photo does this in just a click or two. It’s effective, without the tears!
Apply digital makeup with Radiant Photo
Finally, our last stop on retouching faces with Radiant Photo is the Makeup panel. Here you can add both Skin Toning and digital Blush, with full control over color and where it’s applied.
For Skin Toning, this is literally as if the subject was wearing foundation. There are a set of different Foundation Color to choose and then these can be tweaked with HSB sliders for the perfect shade.
Again, I always believe that subtle is better and that’s no different with the Skin Toning settings. A small adjustment (in this case by applying the Tan foundation) goes a long way.
Blush, similarly, has the same level of control over color, giving you the capacity for quick fixed for retouching as part of your workflow.
Retouching faces with Radiant Photo Mobile: Get it for free
If you’re editing on the go: These portrait tools are now available on mobile, too!
The Portrait tools work in a similar way to the Desktop version, but start from a preset which you can then adjust by tapping the adjustment sliders on the preset tile. For a limited time you can get the Beta of Radiant Photo Mobile for free in the Radiant Photo Mobile Beta Community.
Radiant Photo has you covered for retouching faces
Whether you use Radiant Photo as a stand-alone or as part of your existing workflow (e.g. in Lightroom Classic) the face retouching tools are bound to come in handy for portraits. You can get great results very quickly. No manual masking required!
