Retouching adds personal touch and breathes life into photos, and it doesn't have to be a slow and tedious grind. This course aims to save you time, spark your passion, and help you create outstanding portraits, by showing you an entire retouching workflow, perfected over 10 years of active work both as a professional boudoir photographer and retoucher.
Complete start-to-finish retouching guide will teach you:
Retouching adds personal touch and breathes life into photos, and it doesn't have to be a slow and tedious grind. This course aims to save you time, spark your passion, and help you create outstanding portraits, by showing you an entire retouching workflow, perfected over 10 years of active work both as a professional boudoir photographer and retoucher.
Complete start-to-finish retouching guide will teach you:
RAW Photo Editing - Color Stylisation & Grading, Color Contrast
Efficient Skin Retouch Basics & Tools - Smooth Skin and Preserve Detail
Advanced Frequency Separation & Mixer Brush Made Simple.
Thinking Outside the Box and Creative Ways of Using Tools and Techniques
Finding the Most Time Efficient Methods
Adding Depth and Dimension using 3 Types of Dodge and Burn
Master Subject Separation, Guiding Attention, Boosting Detail
Create Atmosphere and Ambience in Your Photos.
Learn to Analyze Photos, and Squeeze the Last Drop of Color Contrast
Sharpen and Optimize Your Photo for Publishing.
Having spent most of my recent years offering private education, I've noticed a growing trend of photographers reaching out to me with some basic knowledge, that's more often than not, a confusing mess of 'half baked' information, techniques and advice picked up from various Youtube channels. All this in most cases causes total confusion, stress, wasted time, poorly retouched photos, eventually leading to loss of passion and love for this beautiful art and craft.
This course is my best effort to date, to demystify retouching, bring clarity, simplicity and fun into the process many photographers struggle with, allowing you to explore what truly matters - your creativity, efficiently and stress free.
By the end of this course, you will understand where color harmonies are being created, how to post process your RAW file and pull the most out of the RAW data, how to retouch skin for any kind of professional publication or commercial work, how to add depth and dimension to your photos, making the color pop, and creating the sought after subject separation, famously known as the ''3D effect''
Contents and Overview
3 hours of study content and follow along material, covering the way from the initial color stylisation and Lightroom/Camera RAW setup, to a high end professionally retouched photo that could be printed or published. For your convenience, the course is divided into 7 chapters, all starting with a discussion and analysis of our goals, followed by the in depth explanation of the tools we're going to be usingThe course is going to be focusing on non destructive retouching techniques, that are the high end industry standard, explained in a simple, beginner friendly way, A significant portion of the course focuses on color work, that is besides skin work, another key factor that makes a photo stand out. The 7 chapters of the course are:
Chapter I — Color Correction and GradingChapter II — Basic Skin WorkChapter III — Advanced Skin RetouchChapter IV — Dodge and Burn Chapter V — Detail Enhancement Chapter VI — Plugins and AtmosphereChapter VII — Final Color Correction
You will also receivea RAW file used in the lesson, for practice, or if you wish to follow alongTwo Action Packs, there to help you save tremendous amount of timePhotoshop Workspace Presets to help organize your workspacePortrait Retouching Checklist - with everything you need to look at and analyze Dodge and Burn guides and examples
I would add that the methods and techniques you will find here are universal and you can apply them to all kinds of portrait photography (high end beauty, newborn, elopement, studio, neon, outdoor, family, boudoir, lifestyle, glamour, nightlife, commercial, couple, fine art, business…)
Full start-to-finish walkthrough of the coloring and stylization process of an indoor portrait shot via Lightroom/Camera RAW, with complete explanation on Lightroom setup and panels and how we can use them to create subject separation with color.
This will also serve as the analysis of colors present in a raw file and a discussion on finding color harmonies that we can implement. Also included is a quick start to finish edit of an outdoor shot with before and after comparisons.
Before covering the select few skin retouching tools, I will also show you some tips on working efficiently within Photoshop. We will cover the retouching actions I use every day to save time, the many functions of layer masks, the right way to use clone stamp tool, the combination of patch tool and fade technique, the transparent layer and how I use it to fix color, body shaping using liquify, and how you can creatively use the history brush.
Frequency Separation, the holy grail of skin retouch — the technique many speak of, yet so few master.
If it’s bad retouch, there is a 90% chance someone didn’t understand how actually retouching using this technique should be done. This lessons chapter aims to alleviate the stress and show you a correct, professional and, trust me, the easiest way to do it! Most YT teachers never mention the Mixer Brush or Patch Tool Fade techniques when working with Frequency Separation. I will tell you all about it and how you will preserve all that skin detail while giving your image a high end polished look. All of the photos I’ve ever retouched were done this way!
This tutorial breaks down 3 types of Dodge and Burn techniques in a beginner-friendly manner:
the Global D & B, Local D & B and Micro D & B. All 3 are used to add depth and dimension to your image, creating the famous subject separation, commonly known as the ''3D effect''. I will teach you how to contour the body and face like the makeup artists do, shaping light to enhance certain features of the people on your photos.
The techniques taught can be applied to any portrait shot (daytime / nighttime / neon / indoor, outdoor, etc.) even to your landscape photos!
This chapter deals with a variety of techniques I use to deliberately guide attention within the frame. This is also going to be a part in which we’ll be covering various adjustment layers and various non destructive methods. We’ll take a deeper dive into time saving actions I’ve provided you with, learning how to enhance color, boost the detail clarity, whiten eyes and teeth, correct redness, draw color and light where needed etc.
Although this is not a chapter that deals with skin retouching, I’ve decided to include it as a bonus, for those of you wishing to add another dimension to your photos — the ambience!
We will cover a select list of plugins that I frequently use to give my photos the extra ''spice''.
The final chapter aims to help you, squeezing that last drop of color contrast out of your photo using two methods. This will give an image the final look, enhance the retouch applied and color contrast we’ve been working hard on. We will also take a look at the Retouching Checklist I’ve provided you with, analyzing and looking for all the places we can improve our retouch upon. In the end I will teach you a quick way to sharpen your photos and prepare it for export.
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