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The ten-second reminder for successfully retouching photos of people

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Recently, while I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, I stumbled upon this sentence about people’s appearance: “If they can’t fix it in 10 seconds, don’t point it out.” It’s a very clever thought, and I immediately connected it with the retouching process and the rules for retouching people.

Based on this quote, I came up with a reminder of what you should change in Photoshop, and what should remain as-is when retouching photos of people. To keep things clear, I refer mostly to portraits and headshots, as well as wedding or event photos. There are other rules for retouching beauty and fashion images (although I still think you shouldn’t overdo it, but that’s just my two cents). So, let’s get started.

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How to remove red skin in Photoshop in under one minute

If you shoot outdoor portraits during Christmas season in Northern Hemisphere, your subjects’ skin may look red due to the cold. But there’s a quick and effective way to fix it in Photoshop. Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect will show you a quick tip for removing the red patches from skin, and it will take you less than a minute to do it.

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MAC Cosmetics shares photos with unedited female facial hair and Instagram (mostly) loves it

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We’ve seen a few advertising campaigns that went Photoshop-free (or at least liquify-free). The latest company to jump on the minimal-retouching bandwagon is MAC Cosmetics, which posted a product photo with unretouched female facial hair. The post provoked a flood of comments – and people love it! Well, most of them at least.

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how to fix the three most common skin issues in Photoshop

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If you are doing any kind of beauty work, you know that skin is one of the hardest things to deal with. You want to make the skin look good, while not ending up with a porcelain face that looks too smooth and textureless to be real.

There are many tricks of the trade for beauty retouchers and Stefan is sharing three of his favorites: 1. How to remove Peach Fuzz (turns out that this is how you call those little facial hairs). 2. How to remove goosebumps. Yea, I know, the easy answer is heat the room up. If you don’t have control over the room temperature, and your model looks like a duck (or a goose), not all is lost. And 3. How to eliminate bruises.

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Photographer publishes unretouched photos to show that “acne is normal”

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In recent years, the trends in retouching photos have been changing. Altering someone’s appearance isn’t so welcome anymore, judging from the recently reformed guidelines at CVS Pharmacy and Getty Images. Young photographer Peter DeVito has shared a photo series that goes along with these trends, but he’s taking it a step further. In his portraits, he has left the acne unretouched. His goal is to send the message that “acne is normal.”

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Use this Photoshop trick to leave no blemish unhealed

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Removing blemishes is certainly one of the reasons we retouch portraits. And when you’re retouching beauty shots, you don’t want to leave any of them unhealed. Unmesh Dinda a.k.a. PiXimperfect shares a simple trick you can use while removing blemishes in Photoshop. It helps you see them better, and even see the ones that are not obvious at the first glance.

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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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Why do we retouch people in Photoshop?

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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How to create realistic burning skin in photoshop

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If you are doing a still image and want to add some burning skins effects, this video will show you a quick 10 minutes way to do so. You start with a “blank face”, we chose a model on a white background, but any face will do.

To get the scorched texture we used a tree bark (from here) and to get the fire inside we used a fire effect from here. It’s a 7 minutes video, and by the end of it you will have a new tool in your photoshop arsenal.

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