Subject isolation is an important technique that can greatly improve your images. It helps draw the viewer’s eye to the most important part of the photo, creating a more engaging and impactful photo. Whether you shoot portraits, landscapes, or product photography, mastering this technique can elevate your work.
Coming to you from Gareth Evans with Park cameras, this informative video explores some techniques for isolating your subject in Lightroom. Evans uses a portrait as an example, demonstrating how to use exposure, color, masking, and lens blur to draw attention to the subject. Evans starts by making basic overall adjustments, such as cropping, straightening, and adjusting contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity, and vibrance. He then moves on to more advanced techniques, using radial and linear gradients to fine-tune exposure and create texture around the subject.
Evans then delves into color grading, using the HSL panel to adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness of various colors in the photo. He demonstrates how to use the spot color tool to target specific colors, such as distracting green baskets in the background, and reduce their saturation or adjust their hue. Evans also explores the Calibration tab, showing how subtle adjustments to primary reds and blues can dramatically impact the richness and overall feel of an image.
To further enhance subject isolation, Evans used Lightroom’s lens blur feature. This tool analyzes the image, identifies the subject, and applies additional blur to the background, creating a shallower depth-of-field effect. Evans emphasizes that while he doesn’t use every technique in every photo, he always uses these methods to guide the viewer’s eye and create more compelling images. Check out the video above for the full list from Evans.
