You don’t need hundreds of brushes for portrait retouching. You need about five, configured correctly. Most professional retouchers use a surprisingly small set of brushes and rely on pressure sensitivity and blend modes to get different effects.

Here’s my working brush kit and how I use each one.

1. The Soft Round Brush (Your Workhorse)

This is Photoshop’s default round brush with hardness set to 0%. You’ll use this for 70% of your retouching work.

My settings:

  • Size: Mapped to pen pressure
  • Opacity: 20-40% for dodging and burning, 100% for masking
  • Flow: 100% (I control intensity with opacity, not flow)
  • Transfer: Opacity mapped to pen pressure

This brush is what you use for painting dodge and burn adjustments, building up layer masks, and applying color corrections. The soft edge means there are no visible brush strokes in the final image.

2. The Healing/Clone Brush

For the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools, I use a slightly firmer brush:

  • Hardness: 50-70%
  • Spacing: 25% (default)
  • Size: Just slightly larger than the blemish I’m targeting

Why firmer than the soft round? Because a completely soft brush with the Healing Brush can create ghosting artifacts around the edges of the healed area. A medium-hard edge gives the algorithm a cleaner boundary to work with.

3. The Texture Brush

For frequency separation work on the texture layer, you need a brush that applies texture naturally. I use a modified chalk brush:

  • Shape: Photoshop’s built-in Chalk brush (from the legacy brush set)
  • Shape Dynamics: Size jitter 20%, Angle jitter 100%
  • Spacing: 5-8%
  • Hardness: 60%

The angle jitter is critical — it prevents the brush from creating visible patterns as you paint. Without it, you’ll see repeating textures that look obviously stamped.

4. The Skin Texture Brush

This is for painting back skin texture when you’ve over-smoothed an area. You can make one from actual skin:

  1. Open a sharp, well-lit portrait
  2. Find a clean patch of skin with visible texture
  3. Select a square area (about 200x200 pixels)
  4. Edit > Define Brush Preset
  5. Set Shape Dynamics to randomize size and angle

Paint this at very low opacity (5-10%) on a separate layer to restore texture to areas that have become too smooth.

5. The Dodge/Burn Detail Brush

For fine dodging and burning — individual pores, tiny highlights, eyelash tips:

  • Size: 3-8 pixels (yes, that small)
  • Hardness: 80%
  • Opacity: 5-8% (extremely low)
  • You build up the effect with many careful strokes

This brush is what separates good retouching from great retouching. It’s painstaking work, but it’s how you add dimension and life to eyes, lips, and fine facial features.

Pressure Sensitivity Is Non-Negotiable

If you’re retouching with a mouse, stop. A pressure-sensitive tablet changes everything about brush work. The ability to vary opacity and size by pressing harder or lighter is fundamental to natural-looking retouching.

You don’t need an expensive Wacom Intuos Pro. A $50-70 entry-level tablet from Wacom, Huion, or XP-Pen is perfectly adequate for retouching. The jump from mouse to any tablet is enormous. The jump from a cheap tablet to an expensive one is marginal.

Saving Your Brush Presets

Once you’ve configured these brushes, save them as presets so you don’t have to reconfigure them every session. Window > Brushes > click the hamburger menu > New Brush Preset. I keep mine in a group called “Retouching” at the top of my brush panel.

Five brushes, properly configured, will handle virtually any portrait retouching task you encounter.