PHLEARN

Lighting, Bounce Cards, and Background Work: What a 70,000-Product Photographer Does Differently
Video Tutorials

Lighting, Bounce Cards, and Background Work: What a 70,000-Product Photographer Does Differently

Product photography and portrait retouching overlap more than most people expect. When a beauty brand sends me a flat-lay or a packshot alongside a model image, the background work is often the thing that eats my afternoon. Wrinkled seamless paper, color casts bleeding into product surfaces, shadows that read as accidental rather than intentional. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit patching out the corner of a sweep or neutralizing a green bounce from a colored wall.

What a Misfired Studio Light Taught Me About High Fashion Retouching
Video Tutorials

What a Misfired Studio Light Taught Me About High Fashion Retouching

There’s a specific kind of panic that hits on set when something goes wrong and everyone looks to you for the answer. I know it well from my wedding days, and apparently so does Aaron Nace. In this PHLEARN high fashion retouching tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube — Aaron opens with the story of a shoot that started falling apart before a single keeper frame was captured. The model bumped her head, the original setup was scrapped, and what followed was a scramble into an adjacent room with a bare bulb strobe and absolutely no plan.

The Custom Texture Brush That Changed How I Retouch Men's Skin
Video Tutorials

The Custom Texture Brush That Changed How I Retouch Men's Skin

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from delivering a retouch and having a client say the skin looks “fake.” I know that dread personally. Early in my retouching career, I was smoothing skin the only way I knew how, and the results looked like a wax museum exhibit. What I was missing wasn’t effort. It was texture. Retouched skin that holds up under scrutiny has to retain the random, slightly chaotic quality that real skin has, and that’s harder to preserve than it sounds.