Digital Makeup

Digital Makeup in Photoshop: How to Add Lip Color and Eye Shadow with Soft Light Blending
Video Tutorials

Digital Makeup in Photoshop: How to Add Lip Color and Eye Shadow with Soft Light Blending

Clients almost never show up to a shoot with their makeup exactly right. After years of photographing weddings and then pivoting to beauty work, I can tell you that this is just the reality of the job. Sometimes the budget doesn’t stretch to a makeup artist. Sometimes the subject did their own and it photographs flat. Sometimes they look at the final gallery and ask if you can “make the lips pop a little more.

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layer Order That Fixes It)
Makeup Retouching

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layer Order That Fixes It)

A client emailed me once, midway through a campaign project, to say my lip color looked “like a crayon drawing on a face.” She wasn’t wrong. I had painted the color directly onto a merged layer, ignored the skin texture entirely, and wondered why it looked like a sticker someone had slapped onto a photograph. That was about seven years ago, right when I was transitioning out of wedding photography and into beauty work full-time.