Skin Retouching

Clean Skin, Real Skin: A Practical Guide to Photoshop Retouching Basics
Video Tutorials

Clean Skin, Real Skin: A Practical Guide to Photoshop Retouching Basics

There’s a particular kind of client feedback that sticks with you. Early in my retouching career, someone told me my edits looked “plastic” - and they weren’t wrong. I had been smoothing everything into oblivion, removing what made a face a face. Learning to retouch well meant learning restraint, and it meant studying how experienced retouchers actually approach skin. That’s exactly why I keep coming back to tutorials from Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN.

Why Your Headshots Look Retouched (And How to Fix That Before the Client Sees Them)
Portrait Retouching

Why Your Headshots Look Retouched (And How to Fix That Before the Client Sees Them)

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes with opening a headshot session in Lightroom and realizing the skin on every frame is doing something weird. Not broken, exactly. Just… uneven. Patches of warmth next to patches of cool. Texture that looks fine at 25% zoom and alarming at 100%. Corporate headshots are brutal that way. The subject sat under office fluorescents for thirty minutes, the light shifted twice, and now I’m the one who has to make it look like none of that happened.

How to Kill Red Skin Tones in Photoshop Without Wrecking the Rest of the Face
Video Tutorials

How to Kill Red Skin Tones in Photoshop Without Wrecking the Rest of the Face

Red skin is one of those problems that clients almost never mention in the brief but always notice in the final image. Noses, cheeks, the skin just beneath the eyes – redness concentrates in exactly the places a viewer’s gaze lands first. I spent years treating it as a frequency separation problem, cloning and blending until the texture looked right, and the color still looked wrong. It wasn’t until I sat down with Watch the full tutorial on YouTube – Aaron Nace’s PHLEARN walkthrough on correcting red skin in Photoshop – that I realized I’d been solving the wrong problem entirely.

How to Use Frequency Separation for Natural-Looking Skin Retouching (Jessica Kobeissi Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Use Frequency Separation for Natural-Looking Skin Retouching (Jessica Kobeissi Breakdown)

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes with opening a portrait file and seeing uneven, blotchy skin tone staring back at you. Not blemishes, not texture problems, just that muddy patchwork of reds and pinks and shadows that makes an otherwise beautiful shot look like it was lit by a convenience store. Early in my retouching career, I tried to fix this kind of thing with the Spot Healing Brush and a prayer.

How to Paint Convincing Skin Texture in Photoshop (Even When There's Nothing Left to Work With)
Video Tutorials

How to Paint Convincing Skin Texture in Photoshop (Even When There's Nothing Left to Work With)

There is a specific kind of panic that sets in when a client asks you to remove a large tattoo and you realize the skin underneath is, essentially, gone. Not damaged, not blemished. Just… absent. Early in my retouching career, I would have reached for the Clone Stamp tool, crossed my fingers, and produced something that looked more like a blurry knee than a human forearm. These days, I build the skin from the ground up, and the results are dramatically better.

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About Skin Editing (And Where Each One Fell Short)
Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About Skin Editing (And Where Each One Fell Short)

There’s a question I get in almost every workshop I teach: “How do I know when a retouch is actually good?” It’s harder to answer than it sounds. Good retouching is largely invisible, which means the easiest way to calibrate your eye is to study a range of results on the exact same image. That’s precisely why I keep coming back to this experiment from photographer Jessica Kobeissi, where she hired five Fiverr retouchers at price points ranging from about seven dollars to two hundred dollars, gave each one the same portrait with zero direction, and then reviewed the results cold.

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Art of Subtle Beauty Editing
Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About the Art of Subtle Beauty Editing

One of the hardest things to explain to a new client is why a retouch that “does less” often costs more. Early in my retouching career, I lost a client because my edits looked, in her words, like a wax figure. She wasn’t wrong. I had smoothed everything, brightened everything, and in doing so erased the quiet details that made her face feel like a face. That experience sent me deep into studying how the best retouchers actually work, and what I keep coming back to is this: the goal is removal of distraction, not removal of humanity.

Retouching Mature Skin in Photoshop: A Gentle Approach That Actually Respects Your Subject
Video Tutorials

Retouching Mature Skin in Photoshop: A Gentle Approach That Actually Respects Your Subject

Most of my retouching work these days comes from beauty brands, and I’ll be honest - the briefs I find most interesting aren’t the ones asking me to create an impossibly smooth complexion. They’re the ones where the subject has a face that’s actually lived in. Laugh lines, textured skin, a little unevenness in tone. That’s where thoughtful retouching really earns its keep, because the goal isn’t erasure. It’s enhancement.

How to Soften Skin in Lightroom Without Touching Photoshop (A Step-by-Step Guide)
Video Tutorials

How to Soften Skin in Lightroom Without Touching Photoshop (A Step-by-Step Guide)

For a long time, I treated Lightroom as a halfway house. I’d do my exposure corrections, pull my highlights, maybe warm up the tone, and then shuffle the file over to Photoshop for anything that actually touched skin. That was just the workflow. Lightroom was for global adjustments. Photoshop was for faces. Then I came across this KelbyOne tutorial on skin smoothing entirely inside Lightroom, and I had to rethink that assumption.

Frequency Separation for Boudoir Skin: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Rachel Stephens' Technique
Video Tutorials

Frequency Separation for Boudoir Skin: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Rachel Stephens' Technique

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from zooming out on a retouch you’ve spent forty minutes on, only to realize your subject now looks like they’re made of wax. I know that feeling intimately. Early in my retouching career, I leaned hard on the clone stamp and healing brush, smoothing and patching until every pore, every shadow, every bit of character was gone. A client once told me my edits looked “plastic.

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About What Clients Actually Notice First
Video Tutorials

What 5 Fiverr Retouchers Taught Me About What Clients Actually Notice First

Every few months I fall down a rabbit hole that teaches me more than any formal course. This time it was Watch the full tutorial on YouTube — photographer Jessica Kobeissi’s experiment where she sent one professional portrait to five different Fiverr editors, priced from five dollars all the way up to two hundred and fifty, then compared the results side by side with zero back-and-forth revisions. No notes, no direction.

How to Retouch Skin Without Making It Look Like Plastic: Lessons from Jessica Kobeissi's Frequency Separation Workflow
Video Tutorials

How to Retouch Skin Without Making It Look Like Plastic: Lessons from Jessica Kobeissi's Frequency Separation Workflow

There is a specific kind of client email that still lives rent-free in my head. It came in during my second year of doing beauty work, after I’d transitioned out of wedding photography and was still figuring out what “professional retouching” actually meant. The client’s exact words were: “She looks a little… plastic.” I stared at that word for a long time. The skin was smooth, technically. Perfectly, horribly smooth. I had smeared the texture right off her face and called it retouching.