Retouching a Studio Portrait

This Photoshop tutorial is written for experienced Photoshop users and will show you unique techniques for retouching photos. You’ll learn how to enhance backgrounds, dodge and burn, brighten eyes, and add hair shine while keeping a low count of layers. The techniques you learn from this tutorial can be used for other portrait photos.

Subtle Changes with the Liquify Tool

If you have a nice photo of a model, but she or he wasn’t smiling and you want the photo to feature a smiling face, or vice versa, you can use Photoshop to slightly tweak the facial expressions. The key is to be subtle in your approach, unless you are creating a caricature or cartoon. With the Liquify tool, we can create some subtle changes to model photos that can affect the overall mood of the face and therefore affect the mood of the photo.

Adaptive Contrast

Learn a better way to increase contrast using Photoshop. This Photoshop technique protects your image from having blown out highlights and shadows while you increase contrast. Follow this Photoshop tutorial to learn how to apply this new technique.

Local Contrast

Is your lens lacking contrast? Find out how to simulate the contrast qualities of high quality lens with this Photoshop retouching tutorial. This effect increases visible detail and edge contrast without increasing the overall image contrast.

Foreground Lighting

Improve your portraits with this easy and effective foreground lighting effect. In this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to dim the background to add focus to the subject. This effect may sound simple, but it does an exceptional job fixing portraits with busy backgrounds.

Remove Freckles

Reduce slight freckles naturally without using the Healing Brush. In this Photoshop tutorial, you'll learn how to subtract freckles using a layer. This process provides the most natural results for light-brown freckles (ephelides) but will not work for dark freckles (lentigines).

Fix Blown Out Skin

Blown out skin can be an annoying problem with daylight photos. Learn how to use Photoshop to fix overexposed skin areas without creating a gray color cast. This Photoshop tutorial works with all versions of Photoshop and will introduce beginners to the Burn and Blur tools and the Color blend mode.

Flat Skin

Follow this Photoshop tutorial to revitalize the look of skin for portrait photographs. This natural-looking effect evens out uneven skin tones and reduces the appearance of skin imperfections. Skin tones look more equalized and blemishes are reduced without being removed.

Underwater Photo Retouching

One of the most common underwater photography difficulties is trying to capture a photo without extreme color and contrast loss. In this Photoshop Tutorial, you'll learn how to analyze and restore the color and contrast of underwater photos.

Airbrushing - Natural Smooth Skin

Since the pre-digital era, glamour photos have been airbrushed by skilled photographers to remove imperfections on the skin. Now, with advance image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, airbrushing can easily be mimiced with realistic results. However, many airbrushing techniques removes too many details causing the skin to look plastic and unrealistic. In this tutorial, we'll teach you an effective Photoshop technique to simulate airbrushing without losing the texture.

Faux Dynamic Range Increase

Learn how to artificially increase the dynamic range using one picture. Increasing dynamic range make photos to look more alike to what the eye sees in real life. This technique is also an effective alternative for correcting exposure.

Adaptive Saturation

A better way of adjusting saturation. This technique adjusts saturation according to the level of saturation in the image.

Contrast Layers

Use this technique to create a high contrast or low contrast image using a set of contrast adjustment layers.

Digital Flash

Brighten dark areas of a photo like a fill-flash. This effect burns bright areas and dodges dark areas to make photos look closer to what we naturally see with our own eyes.