Skin Smoothing

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.

Natural-Looking Portrait Retouching with Luminar Neo's New AI Tools (No Subscription Required)
Video Tutorials

Natural-Looking Portrait Retouching with Luminar Neo's New AI Tools (No Subscription Required)

There is a specific kind of dread that comes from delivering a gallery and then getting a reply that says “these look a little… airbrushed.” I know that feeling intimately. Early in my retouching career, I overcorrected for every pore and stray hair until my subjects looked like they were made of latex. The lesson I eventually learned, the hard way, is that great retouching is invisible. People should look like themselves, just on their best day.