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Want better portraits? Rotate your canvas while retouching.

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Once, the idea of rotating my canvas when retouching was jarring to me. I knew it was something my peers were doing but I just couldn’t be bothered to try it myself.

After a few one on one lessons where I was “forced” to do it by David Neilands, I actually found a surprising improvement in not only the end result but also in identifying problems quicker with fewer revisions.

Rotating the canvas is actually a technique that was popularised by Pratik Naik of Solstice Retouch. The guy knows his stuff, he won retoucher of the year last year!

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Five different and easy ways to clean up skin blemishes with Photoshop

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No matter who we are, our skin isn’t perfect. It’s just a fact of life. The odd zit here and there, a little scratch, perhaps a single stray hair. There’s always something. So, for portraits, temporary blemishes usually need a quick touch up. Fortunately, such issues are easy to fix in Photoshop. Or, more accurately, Photoshop offers us several easy fixes.

In this video, Nathaniel Dodson from Tutvid shows us five different ways to get rid of them. Each of the techniques shown has its advantages as well as its down sides. Nathan talks through make the most of them and overcome the potential problems. He also explains how these techniques can be used on other images besides portraits, such as landscapes.

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A guide on how to approach dodge and burn, what are you trying to fix?

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Dodging and Burning images is something that I see every day in photography and it seems to have two purposes: Artistic character and removing luminosity based distractions.

Today I’m going to be talking about the latter, removing luminosity based distractions. I’m going to assume you already know how to do dodge and burn (and if not you should check this tutorial), so we’ll skip the baby steps and jump straight ahead to the point of the article!

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How to turn off that annoying grid in Photoshop when you zoom in.

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Hey, guys!

I’ve been working on 4K for the last year, and as such, I have to zoom in quite considerably more than resolutions such as 1080 and 1440 to get to the same level of “zoomed in” view. This extreme zoom-in adds a grid to the view. As a photographer and a retoucher, it can make life very difficult if you’re not aware that you can turn this grid off.

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Photographer creates a MAD world in Photoshop

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I was recently scouring the Interweb when I came across a fantastic, post apocalyptic, promo image. As I looked further it seemed to be for a new TV show, but as I dug a little deeper, I found out it was the brainchild of Jeff Madison.

Jeff is a photographer from New York, and his new photo series Mad World is based on a fictional TV show that comes on after AMC’s The Walking Dead! I like nothing more than when a photographer/digital artist who goes the whole hog and creates detailed stories with their images. I myself tend to write backstories and write down full character sheets before any actual shooting begins. So I was happy to see Jeff building a whole world with his imagination.[Read More…]

Why do we retouch people in Photoshop?

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Do you use Photoshop for your portrait photos? Silly me, of course you do. We all do, and that’s fine. But do you draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable amount of retouching? Do you merely emphasize people’s natural beauty, or are you the one who makes them look beautiful? Scott Kelby – photographer, retouchist, the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, gives a fantastic and inspiring talk on this topic. Why do we retouch people in Photoshop? And do we know what our job as retouchists is?

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Three Photoshop tricks for a scary Halloween

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If you are a retoucher, there is no question about your favorite holiday. Let me guess… Halloween 🙂

Stefan over at the Raw Exchange just shared three quick photoshop tricks to help bring normal photos into scary Halloween composites. (Only instead of a normal photo, stefan is using probably the scariest clown I’ve seen in my life, so if you suffer from clownphobia, you’d wanna skip that one).

I think this is kind of a scary Halloween toolkit, at a very low retouching level. For two of the tutorials, you’d need nothing but a good base photo. (The third one would need a few photos of raw stake).

Also, it’s halloween, so there is some gore and other disgusting things shown on the screen. This is good if you want to get a handle on some scary retouching techniques, but not as good if you are troubled by strong graphical content or blood. Now, without further ado, demonic eyes, White Walkers and gore flesh.

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PortraitPro Body now lets you change your subject’s entire body

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This is one of those announcements that’s going to split the photography world in two. Some will be over the moon that such a tool exists. Others will be infuriated that yet another piece of software is taking the skill away from photography & retouching. A few will also not care one way or the other.

Regardless of your position, PortraitPro Body from Anthropics Technology is here. Described as “the Industry’s first dedicated full body retouching software”, it’s designed to speed up workflow. It also works for both male and female subjects.

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How to make skin pale (and still realistic) in Photoshop

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Another week, another quick tutorial. This week I am going to show you how to turn skin pale in Photoshop. The image I will be using to showcase this is one of my older edits. It is a dark art image, but this effect could be used the same on any image, for example a fashion image. This is a trick I learnt a few years ago from watching Calvin Hollywood’s tutorial dvd Calvinize. Be sure to check his work out as it is awesome! In this tutorial I will be using different percentages of opacity, but it is the same technique.

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