Portrait Retouching

Why Hair Retouching Falls Apart at the Edges (And How to Fix It)
Retouching Techniques

Why Hair Retouching Falls Apart at the Edges (And How to Fix It)

Hair retouching has a way of exposing every shortcut you’ve ever taken. A few years into my freelance work, I got a job retouching a campaign for a Portland-based hair care brand. Eight models, studio lighting, and hair that had been styled within an inch of its life. I thought it would be straightforward. I was wrong. By image three, I had smoothed so aggressively that the hair looked like a molded plastic helmet.

How to Color Hair Realistically in Photoshop Using Quick Mask and Curves
Video Tutorials

How to Color Hair Realistically in Photoshop Using Quick Mask and Curves

One of the trickiest requests I get from beauty clients is changing or enhancing hair color without it looking like someone ran a filter over a stock photo. For a long time, my go-to was Hue/Saturation on a clipped layer, and it worked fine, until a client pointed out that the color looked “painted on.” That one comment sent me deep into researching better workflows, and I’ve never fully recovered. What I’ve landed on is a combination of Quick Mask selection, Curves for contrast and base color, and a clipped Hue/Saturation layer on top.

What Happens When Non-Retouchers Edit Pro Photos (And What It Teaches Us About the Basics)
Video Tutorials

What Happens When Non-Retouchers Edit Pro Photos (And What It Teaches Us About the Basics)

There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from watching someone with zero retouching experience open Photoshop for the first time. No habits, no muscle memory, no shortcuts. Just instinct. When I first started retouching wedding portraits years ago, I made a lot of the same moves I see beginners make now: grabbing the wrong tool, fixing one small thing while accidentally breaking something else, and calling it done way too soon.

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Order That Actually Fixes It)
Color & Tone

Why Your Portrait Colors Look Wrong (And the Correction Order That Actually Fixes It)

The Edit That Made a Client Say “She Looks Sick” I sent off a gallery to a beauty client a few years back, feeling genuinely proud of the work. Clean skin, lifted shadows, the whole thing. Her response was three words: “She looks sick.” I zoomed in on the hero shot and finally saw what she meant. The model’s skin had this greenish, underwater cast that I had completely stopped seeing after two hours staring at the same image.

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Details That Actually Matter
Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Details That Actually Matter

There’s a moment early in my retouching career I still think about. A client flipped through her gallery, paused on a close-up, and said, “She looks like a doll. That’s not what I wanted.” The skin was flawless. It was also completely dead. I’d smoothed away every pore, every subtle shadow, every trace of dimension, and what was left looked like a render, not a person. That feedback stung, but it was the most useful thing anyone ever said to me.

Start in Lightroom, Finish in Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Workflow Breakdown
Video Tutorials

Start in Lightroom, Finish in Photoshop: A Portrait Retoucher's Workflow Breakdown

There was a period early in my retouching career when I was jumping into Photoshop the moment a file landed on my hard drive. No sorting, no initial tone work, no white balance correction. Just straight into layers and healing brushes, wondering why my skin work always felt like I was fighting the image instead of working with it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the order of operations matters as much as the techniques themselves.

Aperture, Dodge & Burn, and the Lighting Truth Every Portrait Retoucher Needs to Hear
Video Tutorials

Aperture, Dodge & Burn, and the Lighting Truth Every Portrait Retoucher Needs to Hear

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from receiving a portrait file where the photographer made choices you now have to work around in post. Muddy backgrounds competing with the subject. A face that’s half-lit because the aperture was set too wide on a two-person shot. Or skin tones so blown out from compensating for a dark environment that no amount of careful retouching will save the highlight detail. I’ve been on the receiving end of all of these, and after years of freelancing for beauty brands, I can tell you that understanding the relationship between aperture, light, and skin texture is just as important for retouchers as it is for photographers.

Portrait Retouching & Color Editing: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Workflow
Video Tutorials

Portrait Retouching & Color Editing: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Workflow

There’s a particular kind of client feedback that stays with you. Mine came early in my retouching career, when someone looked at a set of beauty portraits I’d delivered and described the skin as “plastic-looking.” She wasn’t wrong. I’d been over-smoothing, obliterating texture, and chasing a version of perfection that looked nothing like a real human face. That comment sent me down a long road of studying how working professionals actually approach skin and color, and it’s why I keep coming back to tutorials from photographers who shoot beauty and fashion at a high level.

Canon vs Sony Skin Tones: What the Difference Actually Looks Like (And How to Fix It)
Video Tutorials

Canon vs Sony Skin Tones: What the Difference Actually Looks Like (And How to Fix It)

Every few months I get a file from a photographer who has just switched camera systems, and they cannot figure out why their skin tones look off. The exposure is fine, the white balance reads correct, but something about the color just feels wrong. Before I learned to diagnose this properly, I would chase it around in the HSL panel for twenty minutes and usually make things worse. What I needed was a clear, side-by-side explanation of what these sensors are actually doing to color, not just vague reassurances that “every camera renders differently.

What Scott Kelby's Light It. Shoot It. Retouch It. Finally Gets Right About Teaching Portrait Retouching
Video Tutorials

What Scott Kelby's Light It. Shoot It. Retouch It. Finally Gets Right About Teaching Portrait Retouching

There’s a particular kind of frustration that every self-taught retoucher knows. You find a tutorial with gorgeous results, you follow along as carefully as you can, and what you end up with looks nothing like the final image. Not even close. The gap between “here’s the concept” and “here’s exactly how to do it” is where most instructional content quietly falls apart. I spent years filling that gap by trial and error, and I have a hard drive full of over-processed, plastic-looking portraits to prove it.

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layered Mask Workflow That Fixed It For Me)
Retouching Techniques

Why Your Makeup Retouching Looks Fake (And the Layered Mask Workflow That Fixed It For Me)

A few years into freelancing, I got a message from a client that I still think about. She’d hired me to retouch a series of beauty shots for a skincare campaign, and after I delivered the first round, she wrote back: “The skin looks great, but the lipstick looks like it was painted on in Microsoft Paint.” She wasn’t wrong. I had dodged and burned the lip color directly on the original layer, flattened the texture, and produced something that looked like a wax figure wearing a lip stain.

What America's Next Top Model's Bare-Skin Shoot Teaches Us About Honest Beauty Retouching
Video Tutorials

What America's Next Top Model's Bare-Skin Shoot Teaches Us About Honest Beauty Retouching

There’s a particular kind of dread I recognize in the faces of those America’s Next Top Model contestants before their no-makeup shoot. I felt a version of it myself years ago, early in my retouching career, when a client sent back my work with the note: “These look real.” She did not mean it as a compliment. That moment cracked something open for me about what we actually owe the people we photograph and retouch – and what “beautiful” is even supposed to mean when we strip away all the tools we usually reach for.