Pop Portrait is a free Lightroom preset that adds a little ‘pop’ to your portraits. It brightens photos, makes colors vibrant, and adds a stylish flair. Its adjustments are designed to enhance skin tones and reveal facial features.
Collection: Portrait Presets
Best for: All Types
Style: Bright, Vibrant, Moderate Tones, Warm, Light
If you are looking for a versatile preset that will enhance your portraits, whether shot indoors or outdoors, this is the first one you should go for. It makes your photos more captivating without altering your intended mood and motif.
Keep this Pop Portrait preset in your Lightroom always! You will find yourself using it often, as your casual Instagram filter or the finishing touch to your photo shoots.
Brightens and Enhances Colors in Portraits
Light and Vibrant. The usual problem encountered when taking portraits under natural light is the unevenness of it. There would be unwanted shadows that would cover some of the subject’s features.
Pop Portrait preset solves this by increasing exposure, contrast, and overall saturation. Look how much detail is revealed now in the After photo above. We can see more of the woman’s face, and the pink accents are more vivid. It makes the image livelier and more appealing, too.
These basic adjustments set the foundation for the finer tweaks Pop Preset applies to both light and color. You will see more of this in the examples that follow.
Tints Highlights and Shadows for a Dramatic Look
A Sophisticated Look. Portraits can be much more dramatic when there is accent lighting. The photos you get would therefore have rich lights and shadows, as in the example above.
Pop Portrait preset balances out its boost in exposure by fully muting highlights and decreasing white tones. This makes sure that you will not lose those subtle hues that give your picture depth and definition. On the other hand, shadows are moderately adjusted to become dramatic enough but not harsh.
You can see the result of these improvements in the above After photo. Particularly look at the woman’s face; you will notice how well this preset handles lights and shadows.
Boosts Mid-Tones for Crisp Accents
Fine-tunes Colors. You will notice this preset’s unique look when you shoot your portraits outdoors, with a lot of greens in the background.
For this, refer to the above photo example: the entire image has been enhanced, but you will notice that colors are not equally saturated or vibrant. The green hues behind the subject appear muted, while her red floral headdress looks more striking.
To create this effect, Pop Portrait increases the saturation of red, purple and magenta hues, while it subdues yellow, green, blue, and some orange. This therefore makes your subjects pop more against a desaturated cool-toned background.
Pop Portrait is for Lightroom Mobile, Desktop and…
Like all our presets, you can absolutely use Pop Portrait as is, right out of the box. With any preset you might need to make adjustments to accommodate your specific camera, settings, lighting and subject matter.
If you want more presets like this, you can check out our collection of Lightroom presets for portraits.
- Entirely Adjustable
- Compatible with Lightroom 4, 5, 6, and CC
- Performs with both PC, Mac, and Mobile
- Applicable to both RAW and JPG images
- 100% Free
Free Lightroom Preset by Forrest Lane
