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How to create flawlessly retouched skin with dodge & burn

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Retouching skin with dodge and burn is one of the most valuable skill a photographer can learn. It can have such a dramatic effect on your image, but it does it completely non-destructively. While dodging and burning has been around since the darkroom days, the precision of a digital workflow gives us so much more control. It’s an incredibly powerful tool.

In this video, photographer and retoucher Zoë Noble talks us through her process. You’ll want to clean up the skin first to remove major blemishes, which Zoë also covers in this video. But then, let the dodging and burning commence!

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How to retouch perfect natural looking skin using the clone stamp tool

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There’s a lot of fuss about the overuse of Photoshop and retouching these days. But sometimes it needs to be done, or you just want to. Perhaps you have to clean up a little makeup or get rid of a stray hair or two. Maybe a temporary blemish like a zit or a cut. There’s many different ways to do it, but here’s one I typically tend to avoid. And that’s the clone stamp tool.

I have a love hate relationship with the clone stamp tool. I tend to prefer using the healing brush tool, and only use the clone stamp when I absolutely have to. Mostly because I can never get the clone stamp tool to do exactly what I want. This video tutorial, though, is starting to change my mind. It comes courtesy of photographer and retoucher Zoë Noble, and it’s extremely good.

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Quickly and easily retouch shiny skin in Photoshop & Lightroom

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Shiny skin can sometimes be a problem for portraits, especially if you don’t have a makeup artist. Camera LCDs are so small that you might not notice the shine while shooting. When the shoot’s all over and you’re looking at the images on the computer monitor, what can you do?

There are a million different ways of dealing with shiny skin, but Photographer Joe Edelman is here to give us a couple of very quick methods for both Photoshop and Lightroom. It may not work for every situation, but you can never know too many techniques for Photoshop or Lightroom.

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Skin-Retouching Techniques: Compared

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In general, there are four “famous” skin-retouching techniques on the photography and retouching market to achieve a smooth skin:

  • Gaussian blur (for me not a skin-retouching technique, but I see it a lot)
  • Inverted high-pass
  • Frequency Separation
  • Dodge & Burn

(Yes, there are more, but these are the “biggest” ones “inside” Photoshop)

This article will compare these skin-retouching techniques to show the pros and cons for each of them. However, this article will not show you how to do them, but what the “good and bad” sides are about these techniques – they might be not “black or white” but can be both (like grey-shades).

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How to soften skin with a single click in Lightroom

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Editing photos in Lightroom is my favorite, other than shooting them. It’s fast and convenient, and I try to do as much as I can here so oftentimes I don’t even have to use Photoshop. In this video, Anthony Morganti has a treat for all portrait photographers and retouchers who need a quick way to soften skin. In Lightroom, you can do it pretty much with one click, and Anthony will show you how.

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How to quickly clean up and retouch a messy studio floor in Photoshop

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In an ideal world, studio floors and walls would all be pristine and perfect. But in the real world, even freshly painted and cleaned ones don’t stay that way for very long. They pick up dust and dirt, get smudges, scuffs and scratches, and we end up having to either clean and repaint them more often or just deal with it in post. And if it’s a rented studio, forget about it.

In this video, Robert at Optical Noise brings us his method for retouching studio floors in Photoshop to clean up this mess, and even out the colours.

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Six steps for a quick portrait retouch

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Skylum Luminar has seen some pretty massive changes over the last couple of years. The latest version, Luminar 4, particularly so. It’s had a lot of cool new AI enhancements, like easy sky replacements, and the Structure tool which identifies the different parts of your image and enhances the most important bits.

More recently, they’ve also been showing off some new tools for portrait shooters, too, like the AI Skin Enhancer. We visited the Skylum stand at PhotoPlus 2019 in New York where Skylum’s Chief Growth Officer and founder of 500px, Evgeny Tchebotarev, gives us a walkthrough of processing a portrait in Luminar 4.

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School photographer causes outrage after offering retouching services for eight-year-olds

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Retouching portraits isn’t at all uncommon, and most photographers include it in their services. But if we talk about portraits of children, this becomes a rather sensitive topic. Journalist Sam Walker recently expressed her outrage with a school photographer who offered “basic and premium retouching” for annual school photos of eight-year-olds. The packages included blemish removal, teeth whitening, and evening skin tones.

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Photographer photoshops bride without her knowledge to make her look skinnier, claims that he deleted original photos

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I think that choosing to get married is one of the most important decisions in your life. And choosing the right photographer to document this day is certainly a big decision, too. Sadly, there are many unprofessional photographers out there who can ruin your big day. This happened to a New Zealand couple, who got unpleasantly surprised after seeing their wedding photos. The bride was photoshopped to look skinnier, and when they asked for the original files – the photographer claimed that he deleted them.

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New Luminar 4 will use AI skin enhancer to automatically make your portraits flawless

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Luminar 4 is only days from being released, and Skylum is gradually revealing the AI-powered features it’s going to offer. After automatic sky replacement and smart background enhancement, Skylum is now showing off the automatic Skin Enhancer & Portrait Enhancer. They’re made to assist your retouching process and make it faster than ever before.

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