3 Beginner Tips for Retouching Portraits in Photoshop Tutorial

by Rikard Rodin from nucly.com

In this Photoshop Tutorial I'm going to show you 3 beginner tips, tips that will help you improve the overall appeal of a portrait without that much of a hassle. How to make eyes pop and skin more glamorous, this should work in Photoshop CS, Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC.

You can get the images used to follow along with this tutorial here:

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This post has been adapted from the YouTube tutorial found below.

Watch the video above or just follow the steps as outlined below.

Retouching Portraits in Photoshop

If you want to learn Photoshop with ease, then studying portrait retouching is a great idea. Every Photoshop tutorial for beginners will help you achieve that, but it all comes down to the features you expect and what kind of things you need to change and adapt to your requirements. We created a list with 3 beginner tips in our Photoshop tutorial, tips that will help you improve the overall appeal of a portrait without that much of a hassle.

Retouching the eyes 

A good idea is to add a levels adjustment layer so you can lighten or darken the eyes the way you want. Then you can change the layer blend mode to screen, fill the layers mask with black, and then you can use the brush tool to paint the inside of the eyes with white.

Another thing you can do aside from cleaning up in and around the eye is to use the dodging and burning, healing brush tools and the adjustment layers. This will help you change the iris color or add more depth. These things are a great way to learn Photoshop even more, and you can experiment to see how it works even further.

Fixing skin blemishes 

Fixing skin blemishes is very important because it helps light up the skin tone and it makes everything more realistic. This Photoshop tutorial for beginners encourages you to use a few brushes for this, more specifically the healing brush and the patch healing brush. We also recommend the Patch tool, since it will help eliminate even the larger skin nuances and blemishes in the end.

Fix the lighting with dodging and burning

Whenever you use any Photoshop tutorial, you know that lighting can be a problem. Softening the dodge and burn with the dedicated dodging and burning tool is extremely helpful. It’s also a good idea to retread the skin blemishes and the eyes, because it does help and it allows you to add more clarity to the portrait. Aside from that, it also helps show off the skin color more. And then you can go even further to add a few more small things to really make this feel like your own.

Conclusion

Our short Photoshop tutorial for beginners showed you that even minor changes can actually make your portraits stand out. It’s always a very good idea to try out something new as you optimize and enhance your portraits. It might take a while to learn Photoshop and enjoy all that it has to offer, but the quality is great and it does provide amazing ways for you to enhance every portrait. Test out these great ideas and don’t hesitate to follow us for a new Photoshop tutorial very often!