Backlit portraits are one of my favourite kind of portraits, especially when it is shot against the beautiful golden hour sunlight.
The golden sunlight creates an orange and yellow outline around your model and passes just slightly through her hair.
But the thing with backlit portraits is that they don’t usually look like what you had imagined inside the camera.
Straight out of the camera, backlit photos lack contrast. This is why you need to take special care of it in post-processing.
Here in this post, I’ll be sharing an Adobe Photoshop Tutorial on how to edit backlit portraits.
Bonus tip! I wrote a blog post sharing some tips for portrait photography if you would like to have a look click here.
Table Of Contents
Photoshop Tutorial For Editing Backlit Portraits
Basic changes in Camera RAW
To begin with, when you import your photo in Photoshop, camera RAW window will pop up.
I have edited my backlit portrait picture in the natural tones itself because I wanted to preserve the golden hour glow.
Increase the Dehaze, it helps to bring in colours and contrast back into the photo. Increasing Dehaze also affects the skin colour so you will have to fix it by adjusting the blacks, vibrancy and saturation sliders.
Take up the clarity a little, something around +12. I personally prefer to pull up the highlights to make the sunlight coming in brighter.
Also Read: How To Do Any Kind Of Color Grading In Lightroom
Retouching the skin
To retouch the skin, I use frequency separation method. Check out how I do it on the link below,
Create a Levels layer
This is what my levels layer looks like. The three triangle pointers, starting from left to right, stand for low tones, mid-tones and high-tones.
By taking the high-tones pointer to the left, I increased the whites in the picture.
When you move the low-tones slider to the right, it adds a fade to the shadow regions of the picture.
On moving the mid-tone pointer to the left, the mid-tone regions will be brightened up.
Colour Lookup
Create a colour lookup layer in Photoshop. In it, go to 3D LUT file and select the Kodak 5205 Fuji Adobe 3510 (by Adobe).
Oh! and yes, this entire list is a hidden gem of filters. You can try out and apply any other according to your taste. Most of these filters are very strong, so remember to tone down the opacity and fill to soften the overall effect.
I applied Kodak 5205 Fuji Adobe 3510 (by Adobe) on my portrait photo with an opacity of 72% and 62% fill. The difference is very slight, but every small step counts.
Hue/Saturation Layer
Create a Hue/Saturation Layer and select Greens. As you can see, the background of my picture has a bokeh of trees/greens I chose to Greens in the Hue/Saturation layer and increased its saturation to make it pop a little more.
Just hold on and keep making these small changes. The before and after at the end will be worth it. Trust me.
Whichever colour is in majority in your background, you can increase its saturation by going in the Hue/Saturation layer.
Colour correction in VSCO
The last step, which I do for every picture that I edit, is to colour correct it for mobile screens on VSCO.
VSCO is a great mobile editing app that doesn’t reduce the quality or sharpness of your photograph. In the pro version, you get so many more aesthetic filters to apply on your photos.
In my picture, I have applied G7, my all-time favourite.
Before and After
Ready for a final look at what we created after all these steps? Here you go!
If you have any doubts/questions comment down below and also let me know if you want to post any other Photoshop Tutorial. I post portraits on my Instagram account, have a look here.
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