Photoshop

Four Ways to Fix Red Skin in Photoshop (Without Making Your Subject Look Plastic)
Video Tutorials

Four Ways to Fix Red Skin in Photoshop (Without Making Your Subject Look Plastic)

Red skin is one of those problems that sounds simple until you’re sitting across from a client who keeps saying “can you just fix the redness?” and every approach you try either makes them look sallow, gray, or – my personal low point – vaguely seasick. Early in my retouching work I leaned too hard on desaturation, which flattens everything and gives skin that telltale plastic quality that clients hate even when they can’t name exactly why.

How to Handle Unwanted Shadows When Compositing Portrait Photos
Video Tutorials

How to Handle Unwanted Shadows When Compositing Portrait Photos

Shadow problems have a way of showing up exactly where you don’t want them. A subject’s arm falls across their torso, a leg casts a hard line across a background you spent twenty minutes setting up, and suddenly the composite you were proud of has a giveaway edge that screams “two separate images.” I used to patch these situations with heavy cloning and hope nobody noticed. They noticed. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube

The 15-Minute Eye Enhancement Workflow That Stopped Making My Subjects Look Alien
Portrait Retouching

The 15-Minute Eye Enhancement Workflow That Stopped Making My Subjects Look Alien

The first time a client told me my retouching looked “a little off,” I pulled up the file and stared at it for a long time. The eyes. I had over-brightened the irises, cloned out every tiny vessel, and added a specular highlight so crisp it looked like a render from a video game. She wasn’t wrong. The subject looked like a beautiful doll, and not in a good way. I still have that file.

How to Dodge & Burn Landscapes Without Destroying the Highlights (A PHLEARN Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Dodge & Burn Landscapes Without Destroying the Highlights (A PHLEARN Breakdown)

There is a moment in almost every landscape edit where the image looks technically correct but emotionally flat. The exposure is fine. The colors are fine. And yet something is missing, that sense that the rocks have weight, that the light is actually landing somewhere, that the scene exists in three dimensions. For years I tried to fix this with curves adjustments and vignettes and, honestly, a lot of hoping. It was not until I started paying closer attention to dodge and burn as a sculpting tool, not just a correction tool, that my landscape edits started feeling alive.

Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop CC 2015.5: A Portrait Retoucher's Step-by-Step Breakdown
Video Tutorials

Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop CC 2015.5: A Portrait Retoucher's Step-by-Step Breakdown

Before Face-Aware Liquify existed, reshaping a face in Photoshop meant dragging the standard Liquify brush around like you were trying to ice a cake with a spatula. You’d nudge a jawline, overshoot it, pull it back, and end up with something that looked vaguely melted. I burned through a lot of hours that way early in my retouching career, and more than one client politely described my results as “a little off.

Dodge & Burn Without Destroying Your Image: The Curves Layer Method
Video Tutorials

Dodge & Burn Without Destroying Your Image: The Curves Layer Method

For a long time, my dodge and burn work looked exactly like what it was: painted-on light that had no business being on a human face. I’d grab the Dodge tool, scrub it across a highlight, and end up with something chalky and flat. A client once described my edits as “a little too perfect,” which is a polite way of saying they looked fake. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize the problem wasn’t my eye for light.

Painting Fabric from Flame: A Photoshop Trick That Changed How I Think About Clothing Retouching
Video Tutorials

Painting Fabric from Flame: A Photoshop Trick That Changed How I Think About Clothing Retouching

There’s a specific kind of panic that sets in when a client sends you an image and says, “We love everything except… can you do something about the top?” Early in my retouching career, “do something” meant cloning, healing, and praying. The results were usually unconvincing at best. What I’ve since learned is that sometimes the most elegant solution isn’t to fix what’s there. It’s to replace it entirely with something that looks completely intentional.

5 Skin Retouching Methods That Actually Work: A Lightroom and Photoshop Breakdown
Video Tutorials

5 Skin Retouching Methods That Actually Work: A Lightroom and Photoshop Breakdown

There is a version of a retouched portrait that looks incredible at 100% zoom and completely wrong the moment you step back. I know this because I used to produce that version regularly. Early in my retouching career, a client told me my edits looked “plastic,” and she was not wrong. The skin was smooth the way a vinyl doll is smooth, not the way a real person is smooth. What I was missing was a system.

Redirect the Viewer's Eye: A Beauty Retouching Workflow That Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Redirect the Viewer's Eye: A Beauty Retouching Workflow That Actually Works

There’s a specific failure mode I see constantly in beauty edits, including some of my own early ones. The retoucher fixes everything they were asked to fix, the skin looks clean, the colors are balanced, and yet something about the image feels off. The viewer’s eye wanders to the wrong place. That’s not a technical problem. It’s a compositional one, and no amount of frequency separation will solve it. What solves it is learning to think about visual weight and flow after the camera has already captured the shot.

Camera Raw to Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Walkthrough of Skin and Color Editing
Video Tutorials

Camera Raw to Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Walkthrough of Skin and Color Editing

There is a specific kind of dread that comes from opening a portrait you shot on a busy studio day, knowing the background color is wrong and the skin tones are flat, and feeling like you have to fix all of it before the client follows up. I used to burn hours in Photoshop trying to rescue images that could have been shaped in two minutes inside Camera Raw first. That single shift in workflow order changed how fast I work and, honestly, how much I enjoy retouching.

From Over-Edited to Intentional: How Jessica Kobeissi Retouches Her Old Photos (And What It Teaches Us About Growth)
Video Tutorials

From Over-Edited to Intentional: How Jessica Kobeissi Retouches Her Old Photos (And What It Teaches Us About Growth)

I still have my first retouching attempt saved on an old hard drive somewhere. It looked like someone had ironed the skin flat, cranked the saturation up to a setting I’d now describe as “fever dream,” and then added a glow filter just to make sure nobody could identify the original human underneath. I keep it around on purpose. It’s a useful reminder that craft takes time, and that looking back at old work with honest eyes is one of the fastest ways to figure out where you’ve actually grown.

Why Hair Retouching Breaks Most Retouchers (And the Workflow That Finally Fixed It for Me)
Hair Retouching

Why Hair Retouching Breaks Most Retouchers (And the Workflow That Finally Fixed It for Me)

The first time a client told me my retouching looked “plastic,” I was mortified. I had spent three hours on a beauty shot, smoothing skin, evening out tone, cleaning up the background. The image looked pristine. It also looked completely fake. What I hadn’t touched was the hair, and in hindsight, that’s exactly why everything else fell apart. Hair that hasn’t been thoughtfully edited reads as an afterthought next to an over-processed face.