Retouch Faster, Shoot More: What Scott Kelby's Portrait System Taught Me About Working Smarter

Video Tutorials

Why Your Subject's Face Looks Like a Different Person — And How to Fix It in Photoshop

There’s a specific kind of sinking feeling you get when you’re 80% through a retouch and you suddenly notice it: the subject’s face is a completely different color from their neck and body. Maybe it’s foundation that photographs warmer than bare skin. Maybe it’s a spray tan that stops at the jawline. Maybe the light just caught one surface differently than the other. Whatever the cause, the result is the same — your subject looks like they’ve been assembled from two different people, and no amount of local dodging and burning is going to fix a fundamental color mismatch.

August 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Retouch Car Photos in Photoshop: A Workflow That Actually Works

Most of my retouching work lives in skin texture and color grading, but the skills that make a portrait sing translate directly to product and automotive work. Clean surfaces. Controlled reflections. No distracting garbage pulling the eye away from the subject. When a photographer friend asked me to help clean up some studio car shots last year, I realized how much of what I do every day for beauty clients applies to shiny metal just as well as it applies to skin.

August 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

10 Elements That Separate a Forgettable Snapshot from a Portrait People Actually Remember

There’s a moment early in my retouching career I don’t talk about enough. A client looked at her finished images, paused, and said, “She doesn’t really look like me anymore.” That was the feedback that made me put down my Healing Brush and start thinking differently about what portrait work is actually for. Making someone look great is not the same as making them look different. The gap between those two things is where most of us get lost.

August 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

Lightroom's New Feather and Edge Sliders Just Fixed the Mask Problem I've Been Working Around for Years

There is a specific kind of frustration that only retouchers understand: you build a careful mask, apply a gorgeous tonal adjustment, and then zoom in to find a halo of blown-out sky bleeding into the hair, or a mushy, undefined edge where a clean line should be. For years I handled this with a combination of workarounds, luminance masks, manual brushing, and a fair amount of sighing into my green tea.

August 7, 2026

News

Adobe's Latest Masking Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for Portrait Editors

Adobe’s Latest Masking Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for Portrait Editors I’m thrilled to share some exciting news that’s going to transform how we approach portrait retouching. Adobe has just rolled out significant masking enhancements across its entire Lightroom family, and I’ve been eager to tell you why this matters so much for our work. What’s Changed Across the Board The updates span across Lightroom Classic, the desktop version, iPad, and mobile platforms—which means whether you’re editing at your desk or on location, you’ll have access to these powerful new capabilities.

August 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Mark Up a Portrait for Your Retoucher (and Actually Get What You Want)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from sending a file to a retoucher and getting back something that looks nothing like what you imagined. I’ve been on both sides of that exchange. Early in my retouching career, a client told me my edits looked “plastic” and I was devastated, mostly because I knew she was right. The problem wasn’t technical skill. It was communication, and a complete lack of a shared visual language between the photographer, the retoucher, and the final image.

August 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

Camera Raw to Photoshop: How Jessica Kobeissi Builds a Portrait Retouch from Scratch

There’s a specific kind of client email that used to send me into a spiral. It would arrive two days after delivery, and it would say something like: “These look great, but can you make the skin look a little more… natural?” I knew exactly what it meant. I had over-processed again. My highlights were blown, my skin tones were plastic, and somewhere between Camera Raw and my seventeenth Photoshop layer, I had lost the person entirely.

August 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

Warm Light, Cold Shadows: How Colored Gels Can Transform a Beauty Portrait Setup

There’s a version of a beauty portrait that most of us have shot a hundred times: soft main light, maybe a reflector underneath, clean background. Safe. Competent. Forgettable. For a long time, I thought the path to better beauty work ran almost entirely through retouching. Add more light in post, finesse the skin, call it done. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand that the most interesting thing you can do for your retouching workflow is to give yourself better raw material to start with.

August 6, 2026

Retouching Techniques

Why Hair Retouching Falls Apart at the Edges (And How to Fix It)

Hair retouching has a way of exposing every shortcut you’ve ever taken. A few years into my freelance work, I got a job retouching a campaign for a Portland-based hair care brand. Eight models, studio lighting, and hair that had been styled within an inch of its life. I thought it would be straightforward. I was wrong. By image three, I had smoothed so aggressively that the hair looked like a molded plastic helmet.

August 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Color Hair Realistically in Photoshop Using Quick Mask and Curves

One of the trickiest requests I get from beauty clients is changing or enhancing hair color without it looking like someone ran a filter over a stock photo. For a long time, my go-to was Hue/Saturation on a clipped layer, and it worked fine, until a client pointed out that the color looked “painted on.” That one comment sent me deep into researching better workflows, and I’ve never fully recovered. What I’ve landed on is a combination of Quick Mask selection, Curves for contrast and base color, and a clipped Hue/Saturation layer on top.

August 5, 2026

Video Tutorials

Clean, Polished Hair in Photoshop: A Retoucher's Breakdown of Aaron Nace's Three-Tool Method

Hair is the thing that will make or break a beauty retouch. I learned this the hard way early in my retouching career, when a client sent back a set of edits with a note that the skin looked “plastic.” I had spent all my time on the face and basically ignored the flyaways and ragged edges around the hair. The result was this uncanny valley effect: impossibly smooth skin surrounded by chaotic, untouched hair.

August 5, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Happens When Non-Retouchers Edit Pro Photos (And What It Teaches Us About the Basics)

There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from watching someone with zero retouching experience open Photoshop for the first time. No habits, no muscle memory, no shortcuts. Just instinct. When I first started retouching wedding portraits years ago, I made a lot of the same moves I see beginners make now: grabbing the wrong tool, fixing one small thing while accidentally breaking something else, and calling it done way too soon.

August 5, 2026