Photo Editing

What Tyra Got Wrong About Skin Texture (And What It Means for How We Retouch)
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What Tyra Got Wrong About Skin Texture (And What It Means for How We Retouch)

There’s a clip from the first cycle of America’s Next Top Model that has lived rent-free in my head since I stumbled across Jessica Kobeissi’s reaction video a few weeks ago. Tyra Banks tells a model, on camera, that her skin texture made the retoucher’s job the hardest of the entire shoot. The implication is clear: natural skin is a problem to be solved. I’ve been retouching beauty work long enough to know that this framing does real damage, not just to models on reality television, but to the everyday clients who come to photographers already convinced their skin needs to be erased before they can look good in a photo.

How to Give a Sports Portrait That Nike-Ad Energy in Photoshop
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How to Give a Sports Portrait That Nike-Ad Energy in Photoshop

Sports portrait work is not something I stumbled into naturally. My background is beauty and wedding retouching, where the goal is usually smoothness, softness, a certain kind of quiet polish. But a few of my clients have been pushing into athletic branding, and I quickly realized my usual toolkit was leaving the images feeling a little… pleasant. Pleasant is death for a sports photo. What those images need is drama, contrast, and a visual language that signals performance before a single word is read.

What Happens When You Let 500 People Retouch the Same Photo (And What We Can Learn From It)
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What Happens When You Let 500 People Retouch the Same Photo (And What We Can Learn From It)

There’s a particular kind of learning that only happens when you see the same raw file interpreted fifty different ways. You stop asking “is this edit good?” and start asking “why does this one feel alive while that one feels flat?” That question is worth more than any single tutorial, which is why Watch the full tutorial on YouTube and study what Jessica Kobeissi does in this video before you read another word of this breakdown.

Environment Retouching in Photoshop: How to Clean Up a Scene Without It Looking Touched
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Environment Retouching in Photoshop: How to Clean Up a Scene Without It Looking Touched

Most of my retouching work lives on faces. Skin texture, brow shaping, flyaways, the usual. But every so often a client sends me a lifestyle or product shot where the subject looks great and the background looks like someone’s cluttered spare bedroom. That’s the moment I realize environment retouching is its own skill set, and one I hadn’t taken nearly as seriously as I should have. That’s exactly why this Aaron Nace tutorial from PHLEARN stopped me mid-green-tea one afternoon.

Lightroom's New Feather and Edge Sliders Just Fixed the Mask Problem I've Been Working Around for Years
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Lightroom's New Feather and Edge Sliders Just Fixed the Mask Problem I've Been Working Around for Years

There is a specific kind of frustration that only retouchers understand: you build a careful mask, apply a gorgeous tonal adjustment, and then zoom in to find a halo of blown-out sky bleeding into the hair, or a mushy, undefined edge where a clean line should be. For years I handled this with a combination of workarounds, luminance masks, manual brushing, and a fair amount of sighing into my green tea.

Lightroom's New Masking Tools Changed How I Edit - Here's My Full Walkthrough
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Lightroom's New Masking Tools Changed How I Edit - Here's My Full Walkthrough

For years, my go-to move when a background needed serious work was to drag the file into Photoshop, do my thing, save a layered PSD, and then hop back to Lightroom to finish the rest of the edit. It worked, but it was slow, and honestly, it broke my creative flow at exactly the wrong moment. Somewhere between the export and the round-trip, I’d lose momentum. I’d close the file and tell myself I’d finish it later.

5 Lightroom & Camera Raw Masking Tricks That Will Change How You Work
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5 Lightroom & Camera Raw Masking Tricks That Will Change How You Work

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from knowing a tool exists, using it every single day, and still feeling like you’re fighting it. For the longest time, that was me with Lightroom’s masking panel. I came to beauty retouching after years of wedding photography, and I built my masking habits fast and messy, learning just enough to get through a deadline. It wasn’t until I started slowing down and actually studying how other working photographers use these tools that things clicked into place.

The Uncanny Valley of Perfect: How to Train Your Eye to Spot AI-Generated Images
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The Uncanny Valley of Perfect: How to Train Your Eye to Spot AI-Generated Images

There’s a skill I didn’t expect to need when I made the move from wedding photography into beauty retouching: learning to tell the difference between a photograph and a fabrication. Back when I started, the question was whether a retouch looked natural or “plastic.” Now the question has expanded. Clients send me reference images pulled from social media, mood boards assembled from Pinterest, and inspiration packs cobbled together from who-knows-where, and at least a few of those images in every batch are AI-generated, sometimes without the client even knowing.

The Channel Extraction Trick I Wish I'd Known Years Ago (Plus a 3D Paint Splatter Technique Worth Stealing)
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The Channel Extraction Trick I Wish I'd Known Years Ago (Plus a 3D Paint Splatter Technique Worth Stealing)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from spending twenty minutes wrestling with Quick Selection on a wispy, complex subject, only to end up with a mask that looks like it was cut out with safety scissors. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. Early in my retouching work, I treated channels like that drawer in the kitchen where you throw things you don’t understand but can’t bring yourself to delete.

How to Retouch a Car in Photoshop: Scott Kelby's Workflow Broken Down Step by Step
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How to Retouch a Car in Photoshop: Scott Kelby's Workflow Broken Down Step by Step

Most of my work lives in faces. Skin texture, under-eye circles, the way light catches a cheekbone. But the principles that make beauty retouching work, cleaning up distracting reflections, creating seamless backgrounds, making an image look inevitable rather than labored, apply everywhere. Including, it turns out, cars. I stumbled onto this tutorial while looking for a cleaner way to handle background reflections in product work, and it genuinely reframed how I think about any kind of studio shot.

Stop Fighting Your Masks: How the Subtract Tool Turns Messy Selections Into Clean Edits
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Stop Fighting Your Masks: How the Subtract Tool Turns Messy Selections Into Clean Edits

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from making a solid selection, bumping the exposure, and then noticing that weird glowing halo creeping around the edges of your subject. I ran into this constantly when I first started doing beauty work, and for a long time my solution was either to accept the flaw or spend twenty minutes in Photoshop doing painstaking manual cleanup. Neither option felt right. When I came across this Matt Kloskowski tutorial on the power of the Subtract tool in Lightroom and Photoshop masking, I realized I had been overcomplicating something that has a much more elegant fix built right into the tools I already use every day.

How Lightroom's New Masking Tools Can Transform the Way You Make Local Adjustments
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How Lightroom's New Masking Tools Can Transform the Way You Make Local Adjustments

There’s a moment in almost every retouching session where I think: if I could just isolate that one thing without painting around it for ten minutes, this would be perfect. For portrait work, that’s usually a sky blowing out behind a subject, or a background that needs to be cooled down while the skin stays warm. For years, Lightroom’s local adjustment tools were a workaround at best, and I’d end up hopping over to Photoshop just to grab a clean mask.