Beauty Photography Retouching From Scratch: What I Learned From Mango Street's First Attempt

Video Tutorials

Canon vs Sony Skin Tones: What the Difference Actually Looks Like (And How to Fix It)

Every few months I get a file from a photographer who has just switched camera systems, and they cannot figure out why their skin tones look off. The exposure is fine, the white balance reads correct, but something about the color just feels wrong. Before I learned to diagnose this properly, I would chase it around in the HSL panel for twenty minutes and usually make things worse. What I needed was a clear, side-by-side explanation of what these sensors are actually doing to color, not just vague reassurances that “every camera renders differently.

July 31, 2026

Video Tutorials

The Milky Skin Lightroom Preset Explained: How to Build That Soft, Film-Like Glow From Scratch

There’s a specific client email I dread. Not the “can you fix the lighting” email, and not even the “can you make me look thinner” email. The one that gets me is the “the skin looks a little… plastic?” message. I spent the early part of my retouching career chasing smoothness so aggressively that I’d sand all the life right out of a face. What I actually wanted, and what clients actually respond to, is softness.

July 31, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Retouch a Levitation Photo in Photoshop: A Layer Masking Walkthrough

Every once in a while a technique lands in your lap that solves a problem you didn’t even know you’d been working around. For me, levitation compositing was one of those. I’d seen floating-subject shots all over editorial mood boards and assumed they required either a very brave model or very expensive rigging. Turns out, the magic happens almost entirely in post - and the approach is more methodical than mysterious.

July 30, 2026

Video Tutorials

Stop Guessing at Skin Tones: A Photoshop Selective Color Walkthrough That Actually Works

Skin color correction is one of those things that looks simple until you’re forty minutes into a job, your client is waiting, and the model’s complexion has somehow turned the color of old guacamole. I spent the first two years of my retouching career relying on intuition and a lot of undoing, nudging curves until something felt right. It worked, sort of, but it was slow and inconsistent. The technique I’m walking through today changed that completely.

July 30, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Scott Kelby's Light It. Shoot It. Retouch It. Finally Gets Right About Teaching Portrait Retouching

There’s a particular kind of frustration that every self-taught retoucher knows. You find a tutorial with gorgeous results, you follow along as carefully as you can, and what you end up with looks nothing like the final image. Not even close. The gap between “here’s the concept” and “here’s exactly how to do it” is where most instructional content quietly falls apart. I spent years filling that gap by trial and error, and I have a hard drive full of over-processed, plastic-looking portraits to prove it.

July 30, 2026

Retouching Techniques

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layered Mask Workflow That Fixed It For Me)

A few years into freelancing, I got a message from a client that I still think about. She’d hired me to retouch a series of beauty shots for a skincare campaign, and after I delivered the first round, she wrote back: “The skin looks great, but the lipstick looks like it was painted on in Microsoft Paint.” She wasn’t wrong. I had dodged and burned the lip color directly on the original layer, flattened the texture, and produced something that looked like a wax figure wearing a lip stain.

July 30, 2026

Video Tutorials

Lightroom's New Masking Tools Changed How I Edit - Here's My Full Walkthrough

For years, my go-to move when a background needed serious work was to drag the file into Photoshop, do my thing, save a layered PSD, and then hop back to Lightroom to finish the rest of the edit. It worked, but it was slow, and honestly, it broke my creative flow at exactly the wrong moment. Somewhere between the export and the round-trip, I’d lose momentum. I’d close the file and tell myself I’d finish it later.

July 29, 2026

Video Tutorials

What America's Next Top Model's Bare-Skin Shoot Teaches Us About Honest Beauty Retouching

There’s a particular kind of dread I recognize in the faces of those America’s Next Top Model contestants before their no-makeup shoot. I felt a version of it myself years ago, early in my retouching career, when a client sent back my work with the note: “These look real.” She did not mean it as a compliment. That moment cracked something open for me about what we actually owe the people we photograph and retouch – and what “beautiful” is even supposed to mean when we strip away all the tools we usually reach for.

July 29, 2026

Video Tutorials

Four Ways to Fix Red Skin in Photoshop (Without Making Your Subject Look Plastic)

Red skin is one of those problems that sounds simple until you’re sitting across from a client who keeps saying “can you just fix the redness?” and every approach you try either makes them look sallow, gray, or – my personal low point – vaguely seasick. Early in my retouching work I leaned too hard on desaturation, which flattens everything and gives skin that telltale plastic quality that clients hate even when they can’t name exactly why.

July 29, 2026

Video Tutorials

Frequency Separation in Photoshop: A Step-by-Step Skin Retouching Guide (Based on Jessica Kobeissi's Technique)

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from delivering a round of portraits and hearing back that the skin looks “plastic.” I know that dread firsthand. Early in my retouching career, I was so focused on removing every blemish and evening out every tone that I was essentially painting over my subjects’ faces. The results were technically smooth and completely lifeless. Learning frequency separation was the moment that changed everything for me, because it finally let me work on the color and texture of skin as two separate problems instead of one blunt instrument.

July 28, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Handle Unwanted Shadows When Compositing Portrait Photos

Shadow problems have a way of showing up exactly where you don’t want them. A subject’s arm falls across their torso, a leg casts a hard line across a background you spent twenty minutes setting up, and suddenly the composite you were proud of has a giveaway edge that screams “two separate images.” I used to patch these situations with heavy cloning and hope nobody noticed. They noticed. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube

July 28, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Landscape Photographers Know About Light That We Should Steal for Beauty Work

There is a particular kind of frustration I know well: you have a subject in front of you, the light is almost right, and you are burning through time waiting for the moment to either arrive or not. I felt that frustration constantly in my wedding days, and I still feel a version of it now when I am trying to coax a beauty edit into looking natural rather than constructed.

July 28, 2026