Are you guilty of these top 10 Photoshop retouching fails?
Jul 31, 2017
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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We were all beginners to Photoshop at some point. It’s a rite of passage with just about anything. You have to be a beginner before you can become skilled. And as beginners we make mistakes. Lots of them. But mistakes are how we learn.
This video from photographer Nino Batista highlights his list of the top 10 amateur portrait retouching Photoshop mistakes. We’ve probably all done these at some point or another. But how many of you are still making some of these mistakes today?
It’s quite a list of well known retouching sins. And I’ve definitely done more than a couple of these myself at some point. And there’s certainly a few that aren’t mentioned in the video. Which are you guilty of?
1. Over Saturating Colour
2. Over Sharpening
3. Haloing
4. Red fingers, hands, feet and ears
5. Glowing Eyes
6. Fake Camera Blur (Bokeh)
7 & 8. Black and White Vignettes
9. Not zooming in to check details
10. Blurred Skin
I’m sure there’s plenty more than those listed here. overdone HDR portraits, for a start.
What others can you think of that weren’t mentioned?
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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6 responses to “Are you guilty of these top 10 Photoshop retouching fails?”
#9 is wrong. A lot of problems are caused by working zoomed in…
He didn’t say to zoom in and work exclusively there. He said to zoom in and address any problems.
He didn’t suggest that all editing should be done zoomed in – just that a lot of people don’t zoom in at all, or at least, enough. You should definitely zoom in to check that what you’ve done is up to scratch.
it depends on the usage of your image. If you’ve got a massive 30mpix-file and you are uploading only on social media, you are doing better without zooming in more then 30%. Everything else will be invisible after resizing (up to 2-4 Megapixel )
Agreed. But he covered that in the video.
I’ve done them all and can easily spot now when it is over done. =)