Portrait Retouching

Split, Slice, and Separate: Inside Photoshop's 3D Extrusion Technique (Plus Why Frequency Separation Changed My Retouching Forever)
Video Tutorials

Split, Slice, and Separate: Inside Photoshop's 3D Extrusion Technique (Plus Why Frequency Separation Changed My Retouching Forever)

There is a specific kind of client feedback that lives rent-free in your head for years. Mine came early in my retouching career, when someone looked at a portrait I had spent two hours on and said the skin looked “plastic.” They were right. I had been smoothing and blurring with no real system, no understanding of what made skin look like skin rather than a vinyl mask. That moment sent me on a long search for techniques that held up under scrutiny, and frequency separation became the answer I kept coming back to.

Smooth Skin Without the Plastic Look: A Simple Portrait Retouch Walkthrough
Video Tutorials

Smooth Skin Without the Plastic Look: A Simple Portrait Retouch Walkthrough

There’s a specific kind of client email I dread. It goes something like: “The skin looks a little… airbrushed?” That word, airbrushed, is the polite version of what they actually mean. I learned this the hard way early in my retouching career, back when I thought cranking up a Gaussian Blur and calling it done was a legitimate skin-smoothing strategy. It took me a long time to find techniques that actually hold up, ones that soften without erasing the person underneath.

Portrait Cleanup Before You Touch the Skin: The Step Most Retouchers Skip
Retouching Techniques

Portrait Cleanup Before You Touch the Skin: The Step Most Retouchers Skip

My first week doing beauty retouching, I sent a client a finished file and felt genuinely proud of it. The skin looked smooth, the highlights were balanced, the whole thing felt polished. She wrote back the next day: “I love it, but… there’s a hair across her collarbone, and something looks off near the ear.” I zoomed in. She was right. A stray hair cutting across the neck. A tiny skin tag I’d smoothed over instead of removed cleanly.

Ring Light Beauty Portraits: What Jessica Kobeissi's Shoot Teaches Us About Light, Lenses, and Letting Go of Perfect Conditions
Video Tutorials

Ring Light Beauty Portraits: What Jessica Kobeissi's Shoot Teaches Us About Light, Lenses, and Letting Go of Perfect Conditions

There’s a version of beauty photography that demands a full studio, a rack of modifiers, and an assistant who knows exactly what a “scrim” is. And then there’s the version most of us actually work in: a spare room, a single continuous light source, and a subject who’s ready to shoot right now. I spent years thinking the first version was the only legitimate one. It took watching working photographers like Jessica Kobeissi set up a gorgeous beauty shoot with a single ring light in what looks like a home living room to shake that belief loose.

Frequency Separation, Dodging & Burning: A Complete Portrait Retouching Walkthrough
Video Tutorials

Frequency Separation, Dodging & Burning: A Complete Portrait Retouching Walkthrough

Early in my retouching career, a client told me my edits looked “plastic.” She wasn’t wrong. I was smoothing skin by painting over it with a low-opacity brush on a normal layer, which flattened everything - the texture, the pores, the tiny details that make a face look alive. That one comment sent me down a months-long rabbit hole, and frequency separation is what I eventually found at the bottom of it.

Why Your Portrait Cleanup Is Making Skin Look Worse (And How to Fix It)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Portrait Cleanup Is Making Skin Look Worse (And How to Fix It)

My first real retouching disaster lives on a hard drive I keep in my desk drawer. I don’t look at it often, but I know it’s there. A bridal client had called my edited portraits “plastic-looking,” and when I pulled them back up after that phone call, I saw exactly what she meant. I had blurred the life right out of her face. Pores, texture, the fine lines around her eyes when she smiled, all of it gone, replaced by something that looked more like a wax figure than a woman.

Beauty Dish Lighting for Studio Portraits: What Jessica Kobeissi's Shoot Taught Me About Keeping It Simple
Video Tutorials

Beauty Dish Lighting for Studio Portraits: What Jessica Kobeissi's Shoot Taught Me About Keeping It Simple

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from overcomplicating a studio setup. I spent years as a wedding photographer hauling cases of gear, and when I finally moved into beauty and portrait work full-time, I assumed more equipment meant better results. It took watching photographers who clearly knew what they were doing with minimal setups to shake that assumption loose. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before diving in here, or follow along with the breakdown below and come back to the video after.

Start in Camera Raw: How Jessica Kobeissi Builds a Fashion Portrait Edit From the Ground Up
Video Tutorials

Start in Camera Raw: How Jessica Kobeissi Builds a Fashion Portrait Edit From the Ground Up

There’s a version of me from about five years ago who skipped Camera Raw entirely. I’d double-click a RAW file, immediately dismiss the panel, and jump straight into Photoshop like I was in a hurry to start making mistakes. The result was always the same: I’d spend twice as long pushing sliders around in adjustment layers trying to fix things that Camera Raw could have handled in thirty seconds. Learning to slow down before the “real” editing begins was one of the more humbling lessons of my career.

Retouch Faster, Shoot More: What Scott Kelby's Portrait System Taught Me About Working Smarter
Video Tutorials

Retouch Faster, Shoot More: What Scott Kelby's Portrait System Taught Me About Working Smarter

There’s a specific kind of dread that sets in when you’re staring at a folder of 400 wedding portraits at 11pm, knowing every single one needs skin work before the client preview tomorrow. I lived that dread for years before I finally made the shift from shooting to retouching full-time. What I wish someone had handed me back then was a system - not a collection of tricks, but an actual repeatable framework with a clock attached to it.

Adobe's Latest Masking Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for Portrait Editors
News

Adobe's Latest Masking Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for Portrait Editors

Adobe’s Latest Masking Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for Portrait Editors I’m thrilled to share some exciting news that’s going to transform how we approach portrait retouching. Adobe has just rolled out significant masking enhancements across its entire Lightroom family, and I’ve been eager to tell you why this matters so much for our work. What’s Changed Across the Board The updates span across Lightroom Classic, the desktop version, iPad, and mobile platforms—which means whether you’re editing at your desk or on location, you’ll have access to these powerful new capabilities.

How to Mark Up a Portrait for Your Retoucher (and Actually Get What You Want)
Video Tutorials

How to Mark Up a Portrait for Your Retoucher (and Actually Get What You Want)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from sending a file to a retoucher and getting back something that looks nothing like what you imagined. I’ve been on both sides of that exchange. Early in my retouching career, a client told me my edits looked “plastic” and I was devastated, mostly because I knew she was right. The problem wasn’t technical skill. It was communication, and a complete lack of a shared visual language between the photographer, the retoucher, and the final image.

Camera Raw to Photoshop: How Jessica Kobeissi Builds a Portrait Retouch from Scratch
Video Tutorials

Camera Raw to Photoshop: How Jessica Kobeissi Builds a Portrait Retouch from Scratch

There’s a specific kind of client email that used to send me into a spiral. It would arrive two days after delivery, and it would say something like: “These look great, but can you make the skin look a little more… natural?” I knew exactly what it meant. I had over-processed again. My highlights were blown, my skin tones were plastic, and somewhere between Camera Raw and my seventeenth Photoshop layer, I had lost the person entirely.