How do I get rid of shiny skin with Lightroom?

Question

For photos taken with my Point & Shoot camera, the flash often leave people in the photo with a 'shiny skin' effect. Other than not using the flash (or at least moving the flash off the lens-axis), what's the best way to reduce the shiny skin effect with Lightroom?

Answer 1

The old way of solving this problem, I mean before digital post-processing, was to apply foundation cosmetics on the model face. This is still used for TV shows.

Answer 2

For this photo of my brother and his girlfriend, I used the brush with brightness set to about -10 or -20 (very subtle) with a large feather and the clarity at about -35%. This smoothed out any little specular bumps on their skin and brought down the shininess of the highlight themselves. I'm sure there might be better ways but I ended up with something that I think looks much better.

This was taken on a Canon 50D with the 18-55mm kit lens using the in-built flash.

Here's the original.

Answer 3

Although you could fix this problem in lightroom with reasonable results, you can fix it when taking the picture.

The flash is too hard and overexposes certain parts of the face (and reflects in the eyes), a easy fix is to diffuse the intensity of the light, sometimes this is possible by tweaking the flash intensity but what always works is just put a piece of thin paper in front of your flash. I've advised this to some friends with a P&S and the results are very noticeable and some of them now have a white paper taped in front of the flash.

You should check that the warmth produced does not burn your paper, and if you have a popup flash, you could try the DIY diffuser using a old film canister idea.

Answer 4

Intriguing question. Only way I know how to solve this "well" is with a circular polarizer filter attached to the lens, however I am not sure if this is possible with a P&S.

If you wish to try fixing the problem somewhat with Lightroom, I would try using the selective editing brush (the last tool on the right under the histogram). With this tool, you can essentially "paint on" a variety of color and tone settings. You could try painting on "Highlight Recovery" just in the areas where you need it, leaving the rest of the image unaffected. I am not sure if this will solve the problem, and you might need to tweak some other settings such as color temperature and/or saturation, as recovery has the tendency to shift colors when a single primary (such as reds/yellows in skin tones) dominate.