How to Enhance Portrait Photos with Luminar Neo

For beginners, however, portrait editing can be particularly tricky, even with dedicated tools. It all comes down to knowing what your particular image needs and, crucially, how strongly those adjustments should be applied. Over-processed portraits are a common pitfall, often resulting in unnatural-looking subjects that ruin the quality of the work.

So today, we’re going to look at what to focus on in a portrait photo, which elements typically need refining, and, importantly, which tools inside Luminar Neo you should use to achieve clean and natural results.

What Enhancing a Portrait Photo Means

Knowing what to look for when approaching a portrait edit, and how far to go, is what sets professionals apart from beginners.

There are several key areas a professional portrait photographer will assess when editing. First is usually the skin. If there are any noticeable blemishes, then those should be removed. They can be distracting and pull attention away from the subject. Smoothing the skin is also common, helping to even out tones and reduce the appearance of pores while still maintaining natural texture.

Adjustments to face shape or body proportions can also be made, though these vary depending on the style or genre of portrait photography. In some cases, minor corrections may help counter distortion caused by certain focal lengths, but these should always be applied subtly to avoid unnatural results.

Then there are the smaller adjustments that help a portrait stand out. Brightening the face, eyes, and teeth can help draw attention to your subject. Slight enhancements to lips and eyebrows can also add definition and polish when used carefully.

Knowing whether you’ve pushed these tools just enough, or too far, comes down to experience. One simple method I still use is stepping away from the image and returning to it later. Coming back with fresh eyes makes it much easier to spot issues like overly smooth skin or eyes that look unnaturally bright. You can also ask for feedback, but it’s important to keep what aligns with your style while dialling back anything that looks unnatural.

Start with Light and Tone (The Foundation)

The most important step in portrait editing is the first one, and that is to ensure you start with a strong foundation in your overall image before you begin working on your subject. That’s because your image may need adjustments such as contrast, exposure, and other global corrections. But if you’ve already started by brightening the subject’s face, for example, those global adjustments will stack on top of that. This can quickly lead to overprocessing and a loss of natural skin texture.

So begin by adjusting exposure and contrast as needed. I also like to use the tone curve for more precise control, but I keep everything subtle at this stage, knowing that I’m simply building a solid base to work from.

Tasks such as colour grading I tend to leave until the end of the edit. I’m also very mindful to work on the subject and background separately so I don’t unintentionally shift skin tones. I do this through masking, and Luminar Neo makes this straightforward with tools like Mask AI. I’ll often work on the background first, then assess how well the subject sits within the scene from there.

My colour grades are usually quite heavy, and this method works well for me. You may find a different approach suits your workflow better, but separating the subject from the background is, in my experience, essential for maintaining natural and consistent tones.

Enhancing the Subject

Luminar Neo comes with dedicated portrait tools that do a fantastic job of enhancing your subject while keeping the process quick and straightforward. Here are some of my favourite tools to use, but to save repeating this throughout, keep in mind that less is more. Don’t push everything to 100% just because you can. If you’ve worked with good lighting, your subject should already look great, and your job is simply to refine what’s there.

Face
The Face menu inside Luminar Neo is packed with tools that get you off to a strong start. We’ll begin with Face Light, which is an essential tool. The face is the most important part of a portrait, and if it isn’t bright enough it will struggle to stand out from the background and draw attention. Use Face Light to subtly lift it.

Then there is Face Slimming. Distortion can occur depending on focal length or if your subject is too close to the lens. This tool can help correct that, and in some cases create a more flattering result, so it’s worth experimenting with carefully.

There are also a range of tools for the eyes within the Face menu. Eyes are the next key feature in a portrait, and they are where the viewer’s gaze naturally lands. Through them, your subject conveys emotion and holds attention. You can enhance them using Eye Whitening to lift the whites, Iris Flare to bring out colour, and Eye Enhancer to add clarity and detail. Used subtly, these alone can add a noticeable amount of life to your subject.

Finally, there are tools for the lips, allowing you to gently increase saturation and fullness. The Lips Redness tool can also help refine the overall tone.

Skin
Clean and natural-looking skin is an expected standard in portrait photography, both from clients and general viewers. This used to be a time-consuming process when done manually, but Luminar Neo simplifies it. Head into the Skin menu and gradually increase the effect to smooth pores and even out skin tones while keeping things natural.

There is also Shine Removal, which helps reduce distracting highlights, particularly in the T-zone.

Finally, Blemish Removal allows Luminar Neo to automatically detect and remove spots and imperfections with minimal effort.

One of the biggest advantages of these tools is that they retain natural skin texture. This was always a challenge when doing it manually, and it’s easy to overdo it and end up with plastic-looking skin. It’s something I definitely struggled with early on.

Separating the Subject from the Background

As mentioned before, lighting the face is a great way to separate your subject from the background, but there are other ways to achieve this as well. If you skip these steps, you risk your subject blending into the background and not immediately standing out to the viewer.

Light Depth is a newer tool in Luminar Neo and one I’m currently using a lot. It builds a 3D map of your image, allowing you to relight your scene in a much more controlled way.

What makes it so effective is that it doesn’t just apply light across the entire image, it behaves more naturally by conforming to depth. This means you can target your subject specifically and subtly lift them from the background. You can also use this tool to reduce the exposure in the background as well. When used carefully, it looks natural and does a great job of adding separation.

Finally, there is the Portrait Bokeh tool, which softens the background with a natural-looking blur. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to separate your subject from their surroundings, so if other methods aren’t quite working, this is always a reliable option.

Colour Grading

Luminar Neo offers plenty of ways to bring style into your image, whether you want to work manually or use presets and LUTs for a quicker result. As mentioned before, I like to separate the subject from the background using masking, then apply a heavier colour grade to the background so I don’t affect skin tones.

The tools I use most are Colour Harmony followed by the Colour tool. Colour Harmony allows me to introduce tones into the shadows, midtones, and highlights while also fine-tuning the overall temperature of the image.

I then move into the Colour tool to make final adjustments using Hue, Saturation, and Luminance to balance everything out.

I also like to colour grade manually using the Tone Curve.

This gives me more precise control, and I’ll often refine it further using the Colour tool afterwards. Luminar Neo isn’t short on options either, with tools like Colour Transfer, Toning, and Matte all offering different ways to shape your look.

If you want a more stylised result quickly, you can use the Mood tool to apply LUTs.

Presets are another option, though these are best applied at the beginning of your edit so you can build on top of them.

Removing Distracting Elements

If you’ve been working outdoors and there are unwanted people or elements in your background, it’s important to remove them so they don’t distract from your subject and to create a clean backdrop. Head into the GenErase tool, brush over the unwanted elements, and simply click Erase. Luminar Neo will then remove them and create a seamless result as if they were never there.

Finishing Touches

Then there are some final tweaks and touches that portrait photographers use to help draw attention or add further refinement to an image.

The first is vignetting. It darkens the corners of the photo and, in doing so, subtly encourages the viewer to keep their focus on the subject in the centre of the frame.

Sharpening is also recommended. By using tools such as Structure or the Sharpen tool, you can bring more clarity and texture to the shot.

As with all of these tools, a little goes a long way.

You may also choose to add a bit of stylised grain or a matte effect. This is entirely optional and depends on the mood you’re going for, but it can add a sense of nostalgia and texture to your images.

Finally, use the before-and-after view to assess whether you’ve got the most out of your image without going too far.

It’s also worth stepping away for a while and returning with a fresh set of eyes. When you’ve been editing for too long, it becomes very easy to miss obvious issues.

The Bottom Line

Portrait editing sessions used to be daunting for beginners, with manual work requiring a great deal of precision, time, and practice before reaching anything close to a professional standard. But Luminar Neo speeds up the process and gives both beginners and professionals a helping hand by streamlining the workflow and delivering high-quality results while retaining natural skin textures.

There is still a danger of going too far with these tools, so it’s essential that beginners remember that a little goes a long way. Keeping adjustments subtle will help achieve a more polished and natural result.

Luminar Neo offers a wide range of powerful and enjoyable tools to work with, so after your next portrait session, open up the app and get to work. Have fun!