Are you guilty of these top 10 Photoshop retouching fails?

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?

Stefan Kohler

#9 is wrong. A lot of problems are caused by working zoomed in…
- Rick Scheibner
  
  He didn’t say to zoom in and work exclusively there. He said to zoom in and address any problems.
- Trevor Lovecross
  
  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.
- Stefan Kohler
  
  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 )
- Trevor Lovecross
  
  Agreed. But he covered that in the video.
Hert Niks

I’ve done them all and can easily spot now when it is over done. =)