Adjustment Layers

Video Tutorials

Dodge & Burn Done Right: Why I Ditched the Default Tools (And What I Use Instead)

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from finishing a retouch, sending it to a client, and then immediately seeing what you should have done differently. Early in my beauty retouching career, I made that mistake with dodge and burn constantly. I’d use Photoshop’s built-in dodge and burn tools, spend twenty minutes sculpting light and shadow across a face, keep editing, and then realize the effect was too heavy-handed with no clean way to walk it back.

August 31, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Color Grade a Beauty Portrait in Photoshop: A Walkthrough of Jessica Kobeissi's Layered Approach

Color grading is the part of my retouching workflow that took the longest to stop feeling like guesswork. Skin retouching has rules you can learn and repeat. Color, though, feels more like cooking without a recipe until you build enough intuition to understand why certain combinations work. For a long time, my grades looked either flat or overdone, and I could not articulate why. What changed things was watching professionals who narrate their thinking, not just their mouse clicks.

August 11, 2026

Video Tutorials

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

There is a moment in almost every landscape edit where the image looks technically correct but emotionally flat. The exposure is fine. The colors are fine. And yet something is missing, that sense that the rocks have weight, that the light is actually landing somewhere, that the scene exists in three dimensions. For years I tried to fix this with curves adjustments and vignettes and, honestly, a lot of hoping. It was not until I started paying closer attention to dodge and burn as a sculpting tool, not just a correction tool, that my landscape edits started feeling alive.

July 27, 2026