There’s a specific kind of dread that sets in when a client sends you a beautifully composed shot and says, “Can you bring out the detail in the dark areas?” You open the file, you zoom in, and what you see is a wall of near-black pixels that looks like it has no information left to give. Early in my retouching career, I thought that was the end of the conversation.
There’s a specific kind of client frustration I’ve learned to dread: the one where the photo is technically fine but just feels flat. Good light, clean skin, sharp focus, and somehow the whole thing still looks like a stock image nobody would ever buy. For a long time my answer was to go deeper into skin work, dodging and burning until the image had more dimension. What I wasn’t doing was thinking about the background, the atmosphere, the layer of creative texture that separates a polished portrait from one that actually has a mood.
There’s a skill that took me years to develop, and it has nothing to do with Photoshop. It’s knowing what to look at before you open a single panel. Early in my retouching career, I would dive straight into skin work, dodging and burning and smoothing, only to deliver a finished file and have a client point out that the framing was off, or that a distracting element was pulling the eye away from the subject.
Every fall, Adobe Max rolls around and I do the same thing: I open three browser tabs, scan the announcement pages, and try to figure out which new features will actually matter to my day-to-day work versus which ones are just good conference demos. This year, I saved myself some time by watching Matt Kloskowski’s breakdown of what’s new in Photoshop 2026, and I’m glad I did. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before or after reading this, because Matt’s pacing and visual examples are worth your time on their own.
There’s a question I get from newer retouchers constantly: how do you know what your work is worth? I used to fumble through that answer. Now I point people toward data. Real comparisons, same photo, different hands, different price points. That’s exactly what makes Watch the full tutorial on YouTube this experiment from photographer Jessica Kobeissi so useful. She hired five strangers on Fiverr at $5, $20, $50, $100, and $300, sent them all the same portrait, and then tried to guess which price matched which result.