Posts Comments

You are here: Home / Archives for tutorials

Top 5 Photoshop Retouching Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

March 25, 2010 by

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…]

Filed Under: featured Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Retouching In Photoshop 1 – The Basics Page 2

January 2, 2010 by

Once you’ve completed Retouching in Photoshop Page 1, you may have started to notice the next problem to tackle. We’ve softened and removed the main blemishes, but the skin tone is still blotchy and uneven. In this next step we’ll solve this problem using the dodge and burn tools.

Look at our image below (you will need flash player installed to view it) and roll your mouse cursor over the image. Highlighted in green are areas that are a little too dark, and highlighted in red are areas that are too light. Roll your cursor over a few times, allowing your eyes time to adjust to each image. Remember that too dark or light is hugely subjective, and the example given is one artist’s very rough 60-second appraisal of the skin tone variations at a macro level. It’s just a guide, but it should be enough to train your eye towards these variations. There are others I’ve missed out, and no doubt a few errors, so don’t follow it exact. It’s ultimately up to you how you interpret your image. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

Retouching In Photoshop 1 – The Basics

January 2, 2010 by

Welcome to Part 1 in a series of retouching tutorials aimed at the beginner. I’ve always loved the art of retouching and have been more than happy to tutor and teach people new to the software and the art. Having been asked to produce these Photoshop retouching tutorials it is with great pleasure I bring you this first introduction to retouching for beginners.

Before reading this first Photoshop retouching tutorial I would suggest reading my article on Retouching Mistakes and How To Avoid Them. Having a solid idea of why you’re editing something will make the difference between being an artist or a computer operator in your new hobby or profession as a retoucher. The retouching techniques you will learn through this series of articles will give you the tools you need, and advice on how those tools should be applied on a case by case basis, rather than treating them as catch-all techniques.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,