Boost your portraits with face feature detection

Make your human subjects magazine perfect with Lightroom Classic 12's new features

- Sean McCormack

Lightroom Classic 12 has arrived, bringing with it boosted masking powers for portraits. Before this, you could use Select Subject masks, and then by using shortcut trickery you could intersect a Color Range mask to select skin tones. But of course, it was all about skin, when you might prefer that the face and body have different edits.

But no more. Lightroom Classic 12 detects the face skin, body skin, eyebrows, eye whites (sclera), iris and pupil, lips, teeth and hair, and allows you to create masks for each, or a combination of them. These would usually take sophisticated techniques in Photoshop to accomplish, but now they’re available to every photographer of any level in Lightroom.

If that wasn’t enough, Lightroom will do this face feature detection for every person in your photo. We’re only going to work with one person here, but the steps can be performed for each person in the shot, so those night-out photos can look more like the magazine-perfect photos you see on the newsstands. Simply open up the Masking panel and the ‘People’ detection will begin.

On-photo shortcuts