Welcome to my top five list of Photoshop Retouching Mistakes. If you’re a beginner-intermediate level retoucher, please take five minutes to read through an article that will hopefully, in at least some small way,  improve your working thought process for life.

(excuse the weird formatting of the images, a theme change threw it all out, I’ll solve it soon)

I’m not going to go into massive depth with step by step tutorials, as I don’t believe in them. My apologies for quickly glossing over techniques I don’t have the space to go into in depth here, if as a beginner you’ve never used luminosity masking for example, consult Adobe’s help file, then use your imagination to play with your new selections, using various fills and adjustment layers. If any technique is new to you, go straight to that help file and then experiment before looking at any top ten Google tutorials. The single worst way to learn how to retouch is by looking through the millions of tutorials search engines throw up, because they’re simply saturated with ‘quick-fix’ ten step promises of perfection in under ten minutes. The truth is, perfection isn’t that simple, and neither is good retouching. So if you decided to add something to your Photoshop skill set today, make it what you take from this article. [Read more…]