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

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

Color & Tone

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Order That Actually Fixes It)

The Edit That Made a Client Say “She Looks Sick” I sent off a gallery to a beauty client a few years back, feeling genuinely proud of the work. Clean skin, lifted shadows, the whole thing. Her response was three words: “She looks sick.” I zoomed in on the hero shot and finally saw what she meant. The model’s skin had this greenish, underwater cast that I had completely stopped seeing after two hours staring at the same image.

August 5, 2026

Video Tutorials

What Parabolic Lighting Actually Does to Skin (And Why It Changes How I Retouch)

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed after years of retouching images for beauty brands: the shots that take me forty-five minutes to retouch and the ones that take three hours aren’t separated by the model’s skin, the makeup, or even the photographer’s skill level. They’re separated by the light. When the lighting is doing its job well, the skin already has dimension, the shadows fall cleanly, and my job becomes refinement rather than reconstruction.

August 4, 2026

Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Details That Actually Matter

There’s a moment early in my retouching career I still think about. A client flipped through her gallery, paused on a close-up, and said, “She looks like a doll. That’s not what I wanted.” The skin was flawless. It was also completely dead. I’d smoothed away every pore, every subtle shadow, every trace of dimension, and what was left looked like a render, not a person. That feedback stung, but it was the most useful thing anyone ever said to me.

August 4, 2026

Video Tutorials

Start in Lightroom, Finish in Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Workflow Breakdown

There was a period early in my retouching career when I was jumping into Photoshop the moment a file landed on my hard drive. No sorting, no initial tone work, no white balance correction. Just straight into layers and healing brushes, wondering why my skin work always felt like I was fighting the image instead of working with it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the order of operations matters as much as the techniques themselves.

August 4, 2026

Video Tutorials

Aperture, Dodge & Burn, and the Lighting Truth Every Portrait Retoucher Needs to Hear

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from receiving a portrait file where the photographer made choices you now have to work around in post. Muddy backgrounds competing with the subject. A face that’s half-lit because the aperture was set too wide on a two-person shot. Or skin tones so blown out from compensating for a dark environment that no amount of careful retouching will save the highlight detail. I’ve been on the receiving end of all of these, and after years of freelancing for beauty brands, I can tell you that understanding the relationship between aperture, light, and skin texture is just as important for retouchers as it is for photographers.

August 3, 2026

Video Tutorials

Dodge & Burn Without Destroying Your Image: A Non-Destructive Photoshop Walkthrough

There’s a version of my early retouching work that I keep buried in a hard drive somewhere as a reminder. Flat skin, blown-out highlights, shadows crushed into muddy gray. I thought I was fixing photos. I was actually just smashing the light out of them. The turning point wasn’t one big revelation - it was learning that dodging and burning didn’t have to be permanent, and that you could teach Photoshop to apply tonal changes only where they actually made sense.

August 3, 2026