5 Quick Ways to Enhance Portrait Photos
People nowadays snap a lot of portraits, ranging from headshots to selfies, or even group photos. Considering how popular portrait photography can be it is no surprise that most editors have tools to enhance them – but PhotoWorks is particularly noteworthy.
Not only will PhotoWorks provide you with numerous ways to enhance your portrait photos, but its tools are designed to be extremely intuitive and user-friendly. With their help you’ll be able to quickly touch up and improve your portraits as a professional would.
Automatically Balance the Color and Light
Many photos suffer from bad lighting that makes them overexposed, underexposed or affects their colors. In PhotoWorks you can fix that with a single click by using the auto enhancement module.
It is up to you whether you want to correct the light or color balance, or both. Referring to the histogram will let you check the tonal distribution and decide which option to use.
On top of that if you want you can fine tune the adjustments further by using the manual settings to directly alter the Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Hue, Saturation, and more.
Remove Unwanted Glare
Glare is another common issue that can affect your portraits and make the skin texture look greasy. Fortunately learning how to remove glare in PhotoWorks is easy – and you’ll have several options that you can use.
The easiest way to remove glare is with the Remove Face Shine option in the Portrait Magic tool. It will get rid of the glare on your portraits with a single click.
In some cases you can use other methods to remove the glare however, such as adjusting the Highlights slider, using the Adjustment Brush, or with the Clone Stamp. Each option is different, and suffice to say you’ll be well-equipped to handle any type of glare you encounter.
Fix Red-Eye Effects
If your camera flash was too close to the subject, you’ll end up with portraits that have glowing red eyes – which is what is known as the red-eye effect. That can be fixed quickly using PhotoWorks’ specialized Red Eye Removal tool.
Once you select the tool you can use it to paint over the red eyes in your portraits to fix them. For best results you should adjust the size of the brush, and zoom in to the photo to make painting over the affected area easier.
Whiten Yellow or Stained Teeth
Yellow or stained teeth can make your subjects look older and make smiles look less attractive. However it is easy enough to whiten teeth in your portraits using the specialized preset in PhotoWorks’ Portrait Magic feature.
Not only will the whiten teeth preset help you to make smiles look more radiant and give your subject a set of pearly whites, but you’ll get to control how much you want to whiten the teeth using a simple slider.
Conceal Skin Imperfections
Removing small skin imperfections can be tricky, and over-editing can make your skin look unnatural. That being said if you want a quick way to conceal skin imperfections such as acne, wrinkles, scars, or even eye bags you can use the Healing Brush in PhotoWorks.
As a smart editing tool the healing brush will automatically identify the best area to sample and let you conceal any skin imperfections by simply painting over them. It works best on small imperfections, and you can adjust the brush size to allow for a more precise selection.
The feather and opacity options can help soften the edges of the mask that is applied to make it blend in more naturally.
Conclusion
Overall you should be starting to see how easy it will be to enhance your portrait photos and make them look their best using PhotoWorks. Most of the tools require just a single click or a few simple adjustments using convenient sliders to apply them to your photos.
To be perfectly honest the features described above are just a small selection of the full scope of PhotoWorks’ tools. As you explore its features, you’ll see that there isn’t much that it can’t do, and it will let you really come up with portraits that look like they’ve been snapped in a professional studio.
Featured image by Simon Wijers
