Warm Up Your Portraits for a More Pleasing Look | Lightroom Techniques

First of all, many thanks to Ariane for inviting me to guest blog this week! My name is Wen, and I am a professional wedding photographer based in Schaumburg, IL. I met Ariane through the Chicago Photographer shootout, and quickly became friends, probably because she was mildly amused by my fascination with “philm”! I shoot exclusively in digital media, so you can imagine my excitement when Ariane brought her vintage Pentax film camera!

When the images from our shootout came back, Ariane heard that I “warm” and “desaturate” my images, and asked if I could write up a quick post on how I do that with my digital images, so here goes..

Generally, I feel that portraits are more pleasing to the eye when the image is “warmer” — i.e., images with a higher color temperature that carry an orange/yellow/red hue to them. This gives the feeling of warmth, like what you’d get on a warm sunny day. The reason why this looks better for portraits is because it makes skin tones look healthier and more natural, just like when your complexion looks better after a workout.

If you shoot in auto mode with your digital camera, most of the time, the camera will try to neutralize the scene, therefore giving the image a balanced mixture of cool and warm tones. Take for example, an image I took of this little girl.

My white balance (marked “WB” on your cameras) is set to auto. It’s a great photo, but it was a little too flat and bluish for me. Yes, it was taken on a typical dreary Chicago fall day, so the camera actually did a good job matching what it looked like in real life. But this just meant that the image looks normal. Who wants “normal”? I wanted this image to look special! I wanted the colors to pop, her skin tones to look great, and I wanted more contrast in the photo.

I did a few things in Adobe Lightroom, that took about a minute. The settings were done on the sliders on the right panel (under “Develop” in Lightroom). This post is mostly about warming your image, but for the sake of completeness, I will explain all the key settings I made:
Exposure +0.35 — The image looked a little underexposed to me, eventhough the camera “thinks” this was normal exposure.
Brightness +60 — Baby portraits almost always look better when you increase brightness — this creates a “high key” look, which brightens up skin tones, and makes the overall image looks “happy and bright” – perfect for happy baby pictures!
Blacks +19 | Contrast +40 — Like I said, I wanted the image to POP! And that means increasing the contrast of the image, making the dark areas darker and the light areas lighter. Caution: one can very easily go overboard with the Blacks and Contrast settings, making the image too dark and unrealistic. What you want is a subtle “pop”
White Balance 5,350 — Finally, the most important part. Remember, people look better in warm images. So, I increased white balance from original 4,300 up to 5,350. Anything over 5,000 is considered a “warm” image, anything in the ~3,000 range or less are considered “cool”. White Balance is measured in “Kelvin” – you can read more about it here. But try not to get too hungup with the numbers. Assess the image as you change the settings, and let your eyes do the judging!
Saturation -23 — This is equally important. When you make all the contrast and white balance changes above – all the other colors in the scene will start to saturate (contrast settings actually increases saturation, and increasing white balance causes all the reds in the picture look redder). Therefore, its important to balance that out by decreasing saturation. Otherwise, the little girl’s pink jacket would’ve looked neon pink! So always remember — when you increase white balance and contrast, remember to asses your image and determine whether you need to balance it out by decreasing saturation

Finally, I cropped the image so that its a little tighter, bringing the little girl’s eyes into the rule of thirds.

Final result below; not bad for a minute worth of work, eh?

Of course, there are other ways to achieve this in other photo processing software, such as Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Elements, but we’ll have to pick that up in another post! One of the easiest ways to warm up images in camera is by changing the White Balance setting in your camera. Instead of leaving it at Auto, try “Cloudy” or “Shade” – both these settings have a higher Kelvin temperature, and “tricks” the camera into warming up the image. But most of all, experiment with your camera and the software that comes with it and make your images stand out!

Contact Wen (wen@wenphotos.com / 312.436.2221) | View Wen’s Portfolio