Portrait Retouching

What 6 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About Giving (and Getting) Better Editing Briefs
Video Tutorials

What 6 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About Giving (and Getting) Better Editing Briefs

There is a particular kind of dread that comes with handing your work to someone else. I felt it acutely early in my retouching career, when a client looked at a portrait I had spent two hours on and said, flatly, that it looked “plastic.” That comment recalibrated everything about how I approach skin, light, and instruction. So when I came across a Jessica Kobeissi tutorial where she commissions six strangers on Fiverr to retouch the same professional portrait, I watched it twice.

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Mistakes We All Make on Skin
Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Mistakes We All Make on Skin

One of the fastest ways to sharpen your eye as a retoucher is to look at someone else’s work and pinpoint exactly why it feels off. Not to be harsh, but because your brain starts building a catalog of what to avoid, and that catalog saves you from making the same calls on your own edits. I stumbled into retouching the hard way, after a client once told me my portraits looked “plastic,” and that word stuck with me like a splinter.

Sharpen Portrait Details Without Wrecking Skin Texture - A Lightroom Masking Trick Worth Knowing
Video Tutorials

Sharpen Portrait Details Without Wrecking Skin Texture - A Lightroom Masking Trick Worth Knowing

There was a period early in my retouching career when I was convinced that sharp meant better. Sharp everything, everywhere, always. Then a client looked at a beauty edit I’d delivered and said the skin looked “like sandpaper.” She wasn’t wrong. I’d applied aggressive sharpening globally and the result was texture that read as gritty instead of detailed, harsh instead of refined. That one comment sent me down a rabbit hole of learning how sharpening actually works for skin, and more specifically, how to apply it selectively so your edges and details pop without making a person’s complexion look like it was rendered in a video game from 2003.

The Dodge & Burn Layer Trick That Changed How I Retouch Skin
Video Tutorials

The Dodge & Burn Layer Trick That Changed How I Retouch Skin

There’s a moment in retouching when you realize that chasing perfection with the wrong tools is actually making things worse. For me, that moment came early in my beauty retouching career, when a client told me my edits looked “plastic.” She wasn’t wrong. I was dodging and burning with Photoshop’s built-in Dodge and Burn tools, directly on the pixel layer, and the results were muddy, flat, and irreversible. One mistake and I was undoing fifteen minutes of work.

Why Your Hair Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layer-by-Layer Fix That Changed My Workflow)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Hair Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layer-by-Layer Fix That Changed My Workflow)

The first time a client told me my retouching looked “plastic,” I was sitting in my car in a Trader Joe’s parking lot reading the email on my phone. I had spent three hours on that image. The skin was smooth, the shadows were clean, and I thought it looked polished. What I hadn’t realized was that I’d treated the hair the same way I treated the skin, painting over it with a heavy hand and zero understanding of what makes hair look real.

What Award-Winning Night Sky Photography Teaches Us About Dramatic Lighting in Portraits
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What Award-Winning Night Sky Photography Teaches Us About Dramatic Lighting in Portraits

What Award-Winning Night Sky Photography Teaches Us About Dramatic Lighting in Portraits I’ve always believed that the best creative inspiration comes from unexpected places. This month, I’ve been reflecting on how a major international nighttime photography competition reveals principles that directly apply to our work in portrait retouching and beauty editing. DarkSky International recently announced the winners of their 2026 photography contest, and I found myself captivated—not just by the stunning imagery, but by what these winning photographs can teach us about managing light and shadow in our own specialty.

Hair Volume, Skin Highlights, and the Liquify Trick I Wish I'd Known Earlier
Video Tutorials

Hair Volume, Skin Highlights, and the Liquify Trick I Wish I'd Known Earlier

There’s a specific kind of client portrait that used to trip me up constantly: the studio shot where the hair falls flat, the lighting creates shadows that feel muddy instead of dramatic, and the overall image just needs a lift without looking like it’s been through a filter factory. For years, I’d either over-edit my way out of the problem or leave too much on the table. What I needed was a cleaner workflow that addressed these issues in the right order, with the right tools.

Contour With Light: Using Dodge & Burn in Lightroom to Shape a Portrait Like a Makeup Artist
Video Tutorials

Contour With Light: Using Dodge & Burn in Lightroom to Shape a Portrait Like a Makeup Artist

There is a specific kind of client feedback that stays with you. Early in my retouching career, someone described my skin edits as “plastic-looking,” and I spent the next several months trying to figure out exactly what I had done wrong. The answer, it turned out, was that I had been treating exposure as a global problem. I would lift or lower the whole image and call it a day. What I was missing was the understanding that light shapes a face the same way a makeup artist does, and that Lightroom’s adjustment brush gives us the precision to do that shaping ourselves, one brushstroke at a time.

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Frequency Separation Fix That Changed Everything)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Frequency Separation Fix That Changed Everything)

A few years into my retouching career, a client sent me a single-line email that I still think about: “She looks like a doll. Can you make her look like a person again?” The image in question was a beauty shot I had spent three hours on. The foundation looked airbrushed in the worst possible sense. The blush gradient had been smoothed into a flat wash of color. The highlighter on her cheekbones, which had been this gorgeous, dimensional thing in the original file, was completely gone.

The 10-Minute Portrait Cleanup Workflow That Actually Holds Up at 100% Zoom
Retouching Techniques

The 10-Minute Portrait Cleanup Workflow That Actually Holds Up at 100% Zoom

The file came in at 47 megabytes, shot on a Canon R5, and the skin looked like a topographic map. Not unusual. What was unusual was the turnaround: four hours, twelve portraits, ready for the brand’s Instagram and a full-page print ad. Same edit, two very different output demands. That’s the situation I’m in about twice a month, and it’s exactly why I’ve built a portrait cleanup workflow that works fast without cutting corners.

Frequency Separation for Portrait Skin: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Retouching Method
Video Tutorials

Frequency Separation for Portrait Skin: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Retouching Method

Early in my retouching career, a client told me my edits looked “plastic.” She wasn’t wrong. I had been smoothing everything, flattening pores, obliterating the tiny imperfections that make a face look like a face. It took a long time, a lot of ruined portraits, and eventually a deep dive into frequency separation to understand that good skin retouching is about evening tone and preserving texture, not erasing humanity. That shift in thinking changed everything about how I work.

Halloween Skin Textures in Photoshop: How to Turn a Phone Photo Into a Creature Effect
Video Tutorials

Halloween Skin Textures in Photoshop: How to Turn a Phone Photo Into a Creature Effect

There’s a particular kind of creative paralysis that hits when a client asks for something outside your usual workflow. I’ve been retouching beauty portraits long enough that smooth skin, even tone, and light sculpting feel automatic. But “make him look like a creature” is a different assignment entirely. That’s why I keep a folder of tutorials that push me outside the clean, polished world of beauty work, and this Halloween-themed episode from KelbyOne landed in that folder immediately.