Portrait Editing

High-Pass Dodge and Burn: The Photoshop Shortcut That Changed How I Work
Video Tutorials

High-Pass Dodge and Burn: The Photoshop Shortcut That Changed How I Work

Dodge and burn is one of those techniques that separates a flat edit from a photograph that actually breathes. I came to it the long way, spending months painting on Curves adjustment layers with a soft brush, trying to coax dimension out of skin that just looked… dull. It worked, eventually, but it was slow, fiddly, and not something I could realistically fit into a commercial retouching workflow where a client is waiting on 40 beauty shots.

Two-Pass Skin Retouching: How to Fix Blemishes AND Uneven Tone (Without the Plastic Look)
Video Tutorials

Two-Pass Skin Retouching: How to Fix Blemishes AND Uneven Tone (Without the Plastic Look)

Early in my retouching career, I got a call from a client who said my edits made her model look like “a video game character.” She wasn’t wrong. I had smoothed the skin so aggressively that every pore, every trace of human texture, had been erased. The image was technically clean and completely lifeless. That call sent me down a long road of figuring out how to fix skin without destroying it, and the answer, it turns out, lives in working at two completely different scales.

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.

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.

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.

Should You Outsource Your Photo Retouching? Here's How One Working Photographer Decides
Video Tutorials

Should You Outsource Your Photo Retouching? Here's How One Working Photographer Decides

There is a question I used to avoid answering honestly: do you do your own retouching? For a long time I said yes, even when the answer was “sort of, badly, and it takes me four times longer than it should.” It was only after burning out on trying to be everything to every client that I started getting real about where my skills actually live. I can shape light. I can read a face.

How to Retouch a Whole Batch of Portrait Images at Once (Without Losing Your Mind)
Video Tutorials

How to Retouch a Whole Batch of Portrait Images at Once (Without Losing Your Mind)

There is a specific kind of dread that comes from finishing a wedding gallery, sending it off, and then realizing you forgot to add a key line to every single image. Or that the skin smoothing you applied so carefully to the hero shot looks nothing like what you did to the rest of the series. I lived that dread more times than I care to admit before I started treating multi-image retouching as a real, deliberate workflow instead of just “doing it again for each photo.

Two Techniques That Changed How I Retouch Skin (A Breakdown of Joel Grimes' Frequency Separation and Dodge & Burn Method)
Video Tutorials

Two Techniques That Changed How I Retouch Skin (A Breakdown of Joel Grimes' Frequency Separation and Dodge & Burn Method)

There’s a specific kind of client feedback that stays with you. Mine came early in my retouching career, when someone told me my skin edits looked “like plastic.” She wasn’t wrong. I’d been over-smoothing, chasing perfection in all the wrong ways, and the results looked like my subjects had been wrapped in cellophane. That comment sent me down a long road of studying how professional retouchers actually work, and one of the techniques that genuinely changed my approach was watching Joel Grimes demonstrate his skin retouching workflow in a CreativeLive session.

The Film Photography Renaissance: What It Means for Portrait Retouching
News

The Film Photography Renaissance: What It Means for Portrait Retouching

The Film Photography Renaissance: What It Means for Portrait Retouching I’ve watched something fascinating unfold in the photography world over the past few years. Film photography—yes, actual 35mm film—has experienced a genuine revival in wedding and portrait work. But what strikes me most isn’t simply that film is back in style. It’s why this shift is happening, and what it reveals about how we approach beauty and retouching in our industry.

Frequency Separation the Right Way: A Walkthrough of Jessica Kobeissi's Gaussian Blur Method
Video Tutorials

Frequency Separation the Right Way: A Walkthrough of Jessica Kobeissi's Gaussian Blur Method

There is a specific kind of client feedback that stays with you. Mine came early in my retouching career, when a beauty brand coordinator replied to a delivered gallery with three words: “looks too plastic.” I had smoothed everything. Pores, texture, the slight variation in tone across the cheekbones. The skin looked like a render, not a person. I had been treating the entire face as one problem to solve instead of two separate problems: color and texture.

How I Watch a Headshot Retouching Timelapse and Actually Learn From It
Video Tutorials

How I Watch a Headshot Retouching Timelapse and Actually Learn From It

There is a particular kind of client who emails you the morning after delivery to say the portraits look “a little overdone.” I got that email early in my retouching career, and it stung more than I want to admit. The problem was not that I was working too hard on the skin. The problem was that I had no real workflow. I was just pushing sliders around until something looked smooth, and smooth is not the same as natural.