There’s a specific kind of portrait that haunts you. The light was perfect, the subject was stunning, and then you open the file and realize the hair has collapsed into a muddy shadow and the eyes look flat. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. For a long time my reflex was to jump straight into Photoshop and start reaching for luminosity masks. It worked, but it was slow, and half the time I was overcomplicating something that didn’t need to be complicated.
In this Tony & Chelsea Northrup tutorial, Chelsea walks through a focused Lightroom workflow for enhancing two things that make or break a portrait: the subject’s hair and eyes. She works entirely with the Adjustment Brush, using masks, flow control, and localized color correction to pull out detail that the camera technically captured but visually buried. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before or after reading this, but the steps below are written so you can follow along without pausing the video every thirty seconds.
What I appreciate about Chelsea’s approach is the restraint. She keeps checking herself. The goal isn’t to make the photo look edited. It’s to make it look like what you actually saw when you were standing there.
Step 1: Select the Adjustment Brush and Preview Your Mask
Adjustment brush selected, mask overlay visible on subject’s hair
Open your portrait in Lightroom’s Develop module and grab the Adjustment Brush from the toolbar beneath the histogram. Before you paint a single stroke, press O on your keyboard. This toggles the mask overlay, which renders your painted area as a bright red or pink tint so you can see exactly where your edits will land. It’s one of those features that’s easy to skip and then immediately regret skipping.
Use the right bracket key (]) to scale your brush up to a size that covers the hair comfortably. You’re not doing surgical selection work here. You’re doing a rough pass first, and you’ll refine it later with the eraser. That mental shift alone will speed up your workflow considerably.
Step 2: Paint the Hair Mask
Red mask overlay painted across subject’s hair and highlights
Paint across the entire hair area in broad strokes. Follow the shape of the hair, including any flyaways or curls at the edges, but don’t stress over precision on this pass. Chelsea makes a point that the erase tool exists for a reason, and she’s right. Getting a clean-enough first pass and then cleaning up is almost always faster than trying to be perfect from the start.
Once you’ve covered the main body of hair, press O again to hide the mask and see the actual photo underneath. Now you can evaluate what you’ve selected without the red tint throwing off your color perception.
Step 3: Lift the Hair with Exposure, Shadows, and Highlights
Exposure and shadows sliders being raised in the Adjustment Brush panel
With the hair mask active, bring up Exposure and Shadows to push light into the darker parts of the hair where texture tends to disappear. The goal is to make strands readable, not to make the hair look like it has a spotlight on it. Then nudge Highlights up slightly. This adds a faint sheen that reads as natural gloss on healthy hair.
The ceiling here is important. Too much highlight lift and you cross a line where the hair starts looking synthetic. Chelsea specifically mentions the wig effect, and it’s a real pitfall. A small highlights bump of 10 to 20 on the slider is usually enough to add dimension without losing realism.
Step 4: Correct the Hair Color with Temperature and Tint
Temperature and tint sliders shifted warmer in localized adjustment panel
This step is one of the most underused moves in portrait work. The camera doesn’t always render hair color the way your eyes perceived it on location. In Chelsea’s example, the subject’s hair photographed cooler and less red than it actually was in person. She corrects this by pulling Temperature warmer and shifting Tint toward the red/magenta side.
These are localized adjustments, meaning they only affect the masked hair area. You can make the hair feel warmer and richer without touching the skin tones or background at all. Use the Y key to toggle the before/after split view and check that your correction feels like a match to reality, not like a filter.
Step 5: Use Flow Control to Refine Uneven Areas
Erase tool active with flow slider set to 50 percent
Some parts of the hair won’t respond as well to the same level of brightening. Areas where curls or texture are already less defined can look worse when you lighten them uniformly. For those spots, switch to the Erase tool within the Adjustment Brush panel and drop Flow to around 50 percent. Painting over those sections with reduced flow gently pulls back the effect rather than removing it entirely.
If you overcorrect, switch back to the main brush with a similarly reduced flow and rebuild. This back-and-forth approach lets you dial in natural variation across the hair rather than applying one flat adjustment to the whole thing.
Step 6: Create a New Adjustment Layer for the Eyes
New adjustment brush pin created, separate from hair mask
Click the New button in the Adjustment Brush panel before touching the eyes. This is non-negotiable. Without pressing New, any painting you do will add to the existing hair mask and your edits will stack on top of each other in ways that are hard to untangle later. Pressing New starts a clean pin with its own mask and its own slider settings.
Reduce your brush size with the left bracket key ([) and bump Flow up to around 80 percent for the initial eye pass. Press O to make the mask visible again and carefully paint over the irises and surrounding eye area.
Step 7: Paint the Eyes and Blend the Shadows Carefully
Erase tool blending iris mask near upper shadow area of eye
After your initial eye mask is down, this is where the technique gets precise. The iris is not uniformly lit. The upper portion, near where the eyelid casts a shadow, should be darker than the lower portion. The brightest point in the eye is typically opposite the catch light.
Switch to the Erase tool with Flow at about 50 percent and gently reduce the mask intensity in the upper part of each iris. You’re mimicking the natural shadow fall so the brightening enhancement looks like it belongs there rather than looking pasted on. Chelsea puts it plainly: scary Halloween eyes are what happens when you skip this step and treat the whole eye as one flat selection.
My Take: Apply This to Any Subject, Not Just Curly Hair
I’ve used this exact two-mask approach on portraits with blonde hair, gray hair, and even textured beards, and the logic holds every time. The technique isn’t about the specific subject; it’s about isolating localized problems and solving them with layered adjustments and flow-based blending rather than global sliders.
One thing I’d add from my own practice: after finishing both masks, zoom out to 50 percent and do a slow, honest look at the full image. Eyes and hair edits that look perfect at 100 percent zoom can read as slightly off when you see the whole face. Subtle is almost always the right call.
The single most important thing this tutorial teaches is to work in layers of intention, not in one sweeping pass. One mask for the hair. One for the eyes. Refine each separately. That structure is what keeps portrait retouching in Lightroom feeling controlled instead of chaotic.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see Chelsea’s technique in motion alongside the original portrait.
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