Photoshop

How to Dodge and Burn Without Destroying Your File (The Non-Destructive Way)
Video Tutorials

How to Dodge and Burn Without Destroying Your File (The Non-Destructive Way)

Early in my retouching career, I burned through a portrait by painting directly on a duplicate layer with the actual Dodge and Burn tools. The highlights went gray, the shadows went muddy, and my client very politely told me the result looked “a little plastic.” She was being generous. The problem wasn’t my eye for light and shadow. It was that I had no way to go back and correct the intensity without starting over completely.

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Art of Subtle Beauty Editing
Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Art of Subtle Beauty Editing

One of the hardest things to explain to a new client is why a retouch that “does less” often costs more. Early in my retouching career, I lost a client because my edits looked, in her words, like a wax figure. She wasn’t wrong. I had smoothed everything, brightened everything, and in doing so erased the quiet details that made her face feel like a face. That experience sent me deep into studying how the best retouchers actually work, and what I keep coming back to is this: the goal is removal of distraction, not removal of humanity.

Soft Skin, Real Results: A Working Retoucher's Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Portrait Workflow
Video Tutorials

Soft Skin, Real Results: A Working Retoucher's Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Portrait Workflow

There’s a particular kind of client feedback that stays with you. Mine came early in my career, when someone looked at a beauty edit I’d spent three hours on and said the skin looked “like a wax figure.” I’d been heavy-handing my retouching without a solid workflow underneath it, and the result showed. What I needed was a structured approach to building a clean, flexible base before touching a single blemish.

How to Cut Out Multiple Subjects Fast for Fashion Composites (Gap Ad Breakdown, Part 1)
Video Tutorials

How to Cut Out Multiple Subjects Fast for Fashion Composites (Gap Ad Breakdown, Part 1)

Composite work used to be the thing I’d quietly dread on a brief. Not because the retouching itself was hard, but because my early approach was so disorganized. I’d start painting, masking, and color-matching before I’d even decided where each element was going to live in the final image. The result was hours of rework and a file full of layers named “copy of copy of final FINAL.” It wasn’t pretty.

Retouching Mature Skin in Photoshop: A Gentle Approach That Actually Respects Your Subject
Video Tutorials

Retouching Mature Skin in Photoshop: A Gentle Approach That Actually Respects Your Subject

Most of my retouching work these days comes from beauty brands, and I’ll be honest - the briefs I find most interesting aren’t the ones asking me to create an impossibly smooth complexion. They’re the ones where the subject has a face that’s actually lived in. Laugh lines, textured skin, a little unevenness in tone. That’s where thoughtful retouching really earns its keep, because the goal isn’t erasure. It’s enhancement.

Why Your Skin Retouching Looks Plastic (And the Frequency Separation Fix That Changed Everything)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Skin Retouching Looks Plastic (And the Frequency Separation Fix That Changed Everything)

Early in my retouching career, I got a message from a bride that I still think about. She had waited two weeks for her wedding gallery, and her feedback on the portraits was three words: “we look plastic.” I opened the files and felt my stomach drop, because she was right. I had smoothed every pore, every texture, every shadow that gave her face dimension. What I sent her looked like a rendering of a person, not a photograph of one.

How to Add Depth and Dimension to a Cracked Skin Effect in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

How to Add Depth and Dimension to a Cracked Skin Effect in Photoshop

Special effects work isn’t something I thought I’d ever be doing when I first picked up a camera to shoot wedding receptions in the rain. But beauty retouching has a way of pulling you into corners of Photoshop you never expected to visit, and the cracked skin composite is one of those techniques that shows up more often than you’d think, whether it’s an editorial beauty shoot, a Halloween campaign, or a concept piece for a brand that wants something dramatic.

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

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.

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Painted On (And How to Fix It in Photoshop)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Painted On (And How to Fix It in Photoshop)

A client once told me my retouching looked “like a wax figure wearing lipstick.” She wasn’t wrong. I had smoothed the skin, punched the eye shadow, and deepened the lip color until everything was technically perfect and completely lifeless. That note stung, but it taught me something I now consider the foundation of every beauty edit I do: makeup in a photo has to behave like makeup on skin, not makeup on plastic.

How to Retouch Skin Without Making It Look Like Plastic: Lessons from Jessica Kobeissi's Frequency Separation Workflow
Video Tutorials

How to Retouch Skin Without Making It Look Like Plastic: Lessons from Jessica Kobeissi's Frequency Separation Workflow

There is a specific kind of client email that still lives rent-free in my head. It came in during my second year of doing beauty work, after I’d transitioned out of wedding photography and was still figuring out what “professional retouching” actually meant. The client’s exact words were: “She looks a little… plastic.” I stared at that word for a long time. The skin was smooth, technically. Perfectly, horribly smooth. I had smeared the texture right off her face and called it retouching.

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

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
Video Tutorials

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.