If you are a portrait photographer and edit your images at all, Evoto is an AI editing tool you must check out. It's the perfect tool for retouching efforts. It includes things like skin retouching, dodge and burning, body shaping, makeup enhancements and more. Everything you need as a portrait photographer.
When it comes to post-production, you really need to develop a roadmap or workflow for how to get the results you want without wasting time.
Retouching is an art just like painting or even sculpting. In all honesty, my retouching process has always been all over the place
When it comes to posing models, one of the more difficult genres of photography is the beauty portrait, especially for beginners.
While there is an array of possibilities when it comes to techniques while retouching, ultimately it comes down to granting yourself permission to simply create and experiment. Allow yourself to be brave and step outside the box—you might be surprised by what you dream into existence!
The point is, different people have varying aesthetics when it comes to retouching. But at the end of the day, my goal is to celebrate my subject’s individual skin tones and textures, which brings me to my retouching process.
As photographers, you should focus on making your client look their best, but do not transform them into someone they won’t recognize. The rule of thumb with retouching is to be subtle enough that it’s not even noticeable that you did it. For this level of editing, I find myself starting in Lightroom or another RAW processing program, then retouching in Photoshop. In my opinion, there is no other comparable tool, and with actions, using a tablet for pressure sensitivity, and using a non-destructive post-production workflow, I can run through multiple images with ease. So if you need to dust off your editing skills, these are the five steps to brush up on retouching in Photoshop.
My wife couldn't watch me edit photos of her. She told me that it reminded her of how much older she was getting. As I would work on a picture, she would point out marks she wanted me to remove, or tell me how to handle things that the tiny amount of makeup she wore didn't cover. For her, even though she had great skin and an athletic body, it was a process she didn't enjoy watching, but she did love the resulting images. Now, this happened years ago, and it was an excellent lesson for me in terms of thinking about how clients would potentially look at their resulting images. It also created a set of guidelines I now use when retouching, and I wanted to pass those on to you, so you can avoid the same pitfalls I did.
Now that we’ve finished correcting color and exposure, it’s time to get creative and show off our best work. When it comes to creative editing in Lightroom, there is a lot we can do without having to jump into Photoshop. That’s exactly what I want to cover in this article, while also offering workflows for Lightroom to Photoshop for that extra level of editing.
I began teaching myself how to retouch images with Photoshop version 4.0 (Photoshop CC 2018 is considered version 19). To this day, I still use some of the original processes and tools for retouching. In this article, I discuss the most important step in retouching, then explore the basics of retouching skin, enhancing eye color with blending modes and layer masks, and, finally, problem-solving stray hairs.
