What Is Adobe Lightroom and How to Retouch Your Photos with It
Last Updated on November 11, 2021 by Peter Wood
“I want to download Lightroom, but it is too expensive. Is it worth the price?” When you need an effective way to polish or touch up your HD photos, Adobe Lightroom is one of the best photo editing software around. But it is very expensive similar to other software from Adobe. Therefore, customers wish to learn it before opening a wallet. If you have such a need, you are at the right place. This article will share an unbiased review and simple guide of Lightroom.
Part 1: Lightroom Review
Adobe Lightroom is the leading professional photo editing software. It is only available on a subscription basis, starting from $9.99 per month.
Pros
- Manage and organize photos and images quickly.
- Support a variety of image formats and RAW files.
- Correct camera and lens errors on your photos.
- Detect faces in selfies and portraits using AI technology.
- Integrate a slick and clean interface.
- Sync photos to cloud storage automatically.
- Include many HD photo filters.
- Create panorama and HDR images.
- Available to PCs, Mac, iOS, and Android devices.
Cons
- There might be delays on old PCs.
- The subscription is pretty pricy.
- Cloud storage requires an extra payment.
- Lightroom does not support plugins.
- The learning curve is not friendly to beginners.
Part 2: How to Touch up Photos with Lightroom
We divide photo retouching in Lightroom into three steps, retouch blemishes, stylize the portrait and make adjustments.
Step 1: Remove photo blemishes
Open a photo in Lightroom, click the Spot Removal tool icon and switch it from Clone to Heal. Adjust the brush size with the slider based on the portrait blemishes. Then click on the face blemish you wish to remove. And Lightroom will delete all similar photo blemishes automatically. You can also click and drag the circle to adjust the sample.
Step 2: Stylize the portrait image
Even though you have removed blemishes from your face, the texture and color do not look very well. In such a case, you can make some adjustments and create a natural-looking with good skin tones. Go to the Basic panel and adjust the options in the Color panel. You can use the mask feature to retouch the portrait image. Then head to the Tone Curve panel and modify the curve until your skin tone turns better.
Step 3: Adjust the portrait image
Click on the Adjustment Brush icon to activate it, and select Soften Skin from the Effect menu. By default, Lightroom will set Clarity and Sharpness, but you can modify them with the sliders manually. Then set Feather to 75 and Flow and Density to 100 and adjust the size of the brush. Press the O key on your keyboard and paint over the face in the portrait with the Adjustment Brush tool. Next, press the O key again to hide the mask overlay. Now, your portrait image should look better.
Part 3: The Best Lightroom Alternative to Polish Photos
Though Lightroom is powerful, it is pretty expensive. And students cannot afford it at all. From this point, we recommend WidsMob Retoucher, which can meet your need for photo retouching at an affordable price. Its main features include:
- Retouch photos and portraits with a single click.
- Include a lot of tools that are easy to use.
- Protect the photo quality automatically while editing.
- Support almost all photo formats include RAW.
In short, it is the best alternative to Adobe Lightroom to touch up your photos and portraits.
How to Touch up Photos with Lightroom Alternative
Step 1: Import photos
Launch the best alternative to Lightroom once you install it on your computer. Then you have three ways to import your photos. Click the Import button to trigger the open-file dialog and open the desired images. Drag and drop pictures into the main interface to load them directly. Alternatively, go to File -> Open to enter the open-file dialog.
Step 2: Retouch a portrait image
Select a portrait from the library in the alternative to Lightroom. And you will get the toolbar on the right side. Go to the Retouch tab with a head icon. Then adjust the Skin Smoothing and Skin Whitening options until you are satisfied. For landscape photos, go to the Adjustment tab and modify the Saturation, Contrast, Brightness, Temperature, and Tint options for correcting the color and tones. To touch up the photo further, go to the Film Pack tab. And you will get more options related to image color and more.
If your photo contains some noise, go to the De-noise tab. And you can make the image better by adjusting the parameters, such as Sharpness, Luminance, and Chrominance.
Tip: Whenever you want to withdraw the edit, click the Restore button.
Step 3: Output or share result
After retouching photos in the alternative to Lightroom, you have two options to output them:
Share photo to social networks: Click the Share button at the bottom right corner, select the target channel and follow the onscreen instructions to post it on social media.
Save photo to hard disk: Click the Save button to activate the save as dialog. You enter the filename in the Save As a field, add some tags, click the Where option and select a location folder. Pick the proper output format from the Format dropdown list and adjust the Quality option by moving the slider. Finally, click on the Save button again to output the photo to your local drive quickly.
Conclusion
Based on the guide above, you should understand the benefits and disadvantages of Adobe Lightroom. Moreover, we also share a simple guide to help you touch up your photos in Lightroom with various features. Though this professional photo editor has tons of features, it is hard to master. Moreover, the price is too high for people. WidsMob Retoucher, on the other hand, is not only easy to use but also affordable and as powerful as Lightroom. We hope that our review and guide are helpful to you.