PRO Photoshop Tutorial

In this advanced Photoshop Tutorial, you will learn how to retouch a person’s face while retaining important skin details. Not only do we cover how to do each step in the process, but we also talk about the WHY behind the steps. We cover the essential things that make a huge difference is retouching. It is common for people to retouch skin, but leave other important things undone, simply because they don’t know what is important to make a portrait look better. Not anymore.

Keeping Details

It is far easier to take someone’s face and blur it to oblivion and call it “retouched” than to take what exists and mold it into a smoother version of itself. One of the biggest telling points between a poorly done retouch, and a professional job, is the amount of detail. Keeping details in skin is probably the most important part of retouching. A person without any details left in their skin will come out looking like a mannequin. How to avoid that plastic blur is what we teach in this Advanced Photoshop Tutorial. We go over all the great methods used by professional retouchers to keep detail, while smoothing and reshaping a face.

Sculpting the Face

Skin retouching goes beyond smoothing the details that exist in the photo. In this tutorial, we cover how to actually sculpt a person’s face in order to make them appear more photogenic. These techniques are used in magazines and professional portfolios, and often photographers pay thousands to have their images retouched. We are not going to get into the morals of skin retouching here. Most clients want it done, and it will help keep you competitive. Most people don’t want to see the before image of themselves, but shown an image after a good retouch, and they will glow. Just be sure to ask your subject what they are comfortable with, and listen.

Staying True

As you can see here, the goal of a good retouch job is to make the person look like themselves. The subject should look at the end result and think to themselves “I look good in this photo”. If they are thinking “Who is THAT! Not Me!”, we are not doing our jobs correctly. There is a lot that can be done to clean up an image, with keeping the person looking like themselves. Retouching is often made up of many small details. On their own, they don’t have too much of an impact, but brought together can dramatically change a photo.

Final Image

Skin retouching is a very delicate process, and doing it a few times is the best way to get the best result. Most people (including Aaron) have the tendency to over-do any effects or retouching done on a photo. This photo for example, is a bit more retouched than I would prefer. It is important here to show how far you can take a retouch, and from there allow you to decide how much to scale it back.