Retouching Tutorial

Video Tutorials

Dodge & Burn Without the Dread: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Jessica Kobeissi's Portrait Retouching Method

For a long time, dodge and burn was the technique I kept meaning to learn. I’d open Photoshop, get three minutes in, and quietly close the layer panel and go back to frequency separation. Sound familiar? The problem wasn’t motivation. It was that most tutorials either skipped the setup or assumed you already had an intuition for how light sculpts a face. I didn’t, not really, and every attempt left my subjects looking like they’d been buffed with a floor polisher.

August 20, 2026

Video Tutorials

How to Use Photoshop's Healing Brush Tool for Clean, Natural-Looking Skin Retouching

There is a specific kind of dread that comes from delivering a gallery and getting a reply that says “the skin looks a little… off.” I know that dread well. Early in my retouching career, I was flattening blemishes with heavy-handed dot-clicks and wondering why my subjects looked like they were wearing a wax mask. The problem was not my eye. It was my technique. Specifically, it was the way I was using the Healing Brush Tool – randomly, without a system, and definitely without understanding what was actually happening under the hood.

August 10, 2026

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.

August 2, 2026