How to Dodge & Burn Landscapes Without Destroying the Highlights (A PHLEARN Breakdown)

Video Tutorials

How to Remove Skin Redness in Photoshop Using Hue/Saturation (The Right Way)

There’s a specific kind of client email I used to dread. The one that arrives two days after delivery, very polite, that says something like: “The skin still looks a little red in a few spots.” Early in my retouching work, my answer to redness was almost always the same wrong tool: the Brush tool, a sampled skin tone, and way too much opacity. The results looked painted. I’d fix the redness and introduce something worse.

July 27, 2026

Video Tutorials

Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop CC 2015.5: A Portrait Retoucher's Step-by-Step Breakdown

Before Face-Aware Liquify existed, reshaping a face in Photoshop meant dragging the standard Liquify brush around like you were trying to ice a cake with a spatula. You’d nudge a jawline, overshoot it, pull it back, and end up with something that looked vaguely melted. I burned through a lot of hours that way early in my retouching career, and more than one client politely described my results as “a little off.

July 27, 2026

News

The Three Colors That Will Always Betray a Heavy Hand in Editing

I’ve been retouching portraits for over a decade, and I’ve learned that certain editing mistakes are absolutely impossible to hide—no matter how skilled you are with your tools. After working with hundreds of clients, I’ve identified three specific colors that our brains are wired to scrutinize more carefully than anything else in a photograph. The Three Colors That Give Us Away When we edit a jacket color or shift the tone of a background wall, most viewers won’t catch the change.

July 27, 2026

Video Tutorials

Dodge & Burn Without Destroying Your Image: The Curves Layer Method

For a long time, my dodge and burn work looked exactly like what it was: painted-on light that had no business being on a human face. I’d grab the Dodge tool, scrub it across a highlight, and end up with something chalky and flat. A client once described my edits as “a little too perfect,” which is a polite way of saying they looked fake. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize the problem wasn’t my eye for light.

July 26, 2026

Video Tutorials

Frequency Separation for Beginners: A Working Retoucher's Guide to Jessica Kobeissi's Method

Early in my retouching career, I had a client look at a finished portrait and tell me the skin looked “like a wax figure.” She wasn’t wrong. I’d been painting over everything on a single merged layer, smoothing out texture along with blemishes, and the result was exactly as plastic as she described. That comment sent me down a long road of learning how to separate what I was fixing from what I needed to preserve.

July 26, 2026

Video Tutorials

Painting Fabric from Flame: A Photoshop Trick That Changed How I Think About Clothing Retouching

There’s a specific kind of panic that sets in when a client sends you an image and says, “We love everything except… can you do something about the top?” Early in my retouching career, “do something” meant cloning, healing, and praying. The results were usually unconvincing at best. What I’ve since learned is that sometimes the most elegant solution isn’t to fix what’s there. It’s to replace it entirely with something that looks completely intentional.

July 26, 2026

Retouching Techniques

The Five-Minute Portrait Cleanup That Makes Everything Else Work Better

What Photographers Skip That Retouchers Never Do A few years back, I got a file from a photographer I’d just started working with. Beautiful natural light, great expression, solid composition. I opened it in Photoshop and immediately spotted the problem: flyaway hairs crossing the subject’s eyes, a visible bra strap, a small but distracting catchlight from a phone screen in the background, and a coffee stain on the backdrop that the photographer had clearly stopped seeing somewhere around hour four of the shoot.

July 26, 2026

Video Tutorials

5 Skin Retouching Methods That Actually Work: A Lightroom and Photoshop Breakdown

There is a version of a retouched portrait that looks incredible at 100% zoom and completely wrong the moment you step back. I know this because I used to produce that version regularly. Early in my retouching career, a client told me my edits looked “plastic,” and she was not wrong. The skin was smooth the way a vinyl doll is smooth, not the way a real person is smooth. What I was missing was a system.

July 25, 2026

Video Tutorials

Beauty Dish Lighting for Portrait Photographers: What Makes It Worth Every Penny

I’ve spent a lot of time on the retouching side of beauty photography, which means I’ve also spent a lot of time studying the images that arrive in my inbox before I ever open Photoshop. The lighting in those source files tells me everything. A flat, overexposed beauty shot gives me almost nothing to work with. But an image shot with dimensional, sculpted light? That’s where retouching actually gets to shine, because you’re enhancing something that’s already working rather than trying to manufacture structure that was never there to begin with.

July 25, 2026

Video Tutorials

Redirect the Viewer's Eye: A Beauty Retouching Workflow That Actually Works

There’s a specific failure mode I see constantly in beauty edits, including some of my own early ones. The retoucher fixes everything they were asked to fix, the skin looks clean, the colors are balanced, and yet something about the image feels off. The viewer’s eye wanders to the wrong place. That’s not a technical problem. It’s a compositional one, and no amount of frequency separation will solve it. What solves it is learning to think about visual weight and flow after the camera has already captured the shot.

July 25, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Slim and Contour Bodies in Photoshop Using the Warp Tool (Without Making It Obvious)

There’s a specific kind of client photo that used to tie my stomach in knots. You know the one: a genuinely beautiful image, great light, good connection, but the angle or the pose has added visual weight in a way that doesn’t reflect how the person actually looks. Early in my retouching career, I’d reach straight for Liquify, push pixels around trying to be careful, and end up with something that looked either untouched or obviously warped.

July 24, 2026

Video Tutorials

Light in Layers: How Karl Taylor's Live Beauty Shoot Cracked My Lighting Logic

There’s a gap that most retouchers know intimately, even if we don’t talk about it out loud. We can fix almost anything in post. But when the light in the original image is genuinely good, the retouch work shrinks to almost nothing. The skin holds its texture. The shadows fall where they should. The whole edit takes a fraction of the time. That’s why I keep circling back to lighting education, even though my day job is retouching rather than shooting.

July 24, 2026