Retouching, much like photography itself, is a really subjective topic in the community. What one photographer considers great, another considers mediocre. While there are many debatable topics regarding retouching, I think it’s important to note these three things most photographers get wrong when they’re retouching.

Dodging and burning for cleaning skin is very common amongst high-end retouchers and for a reason: when mastered, it gives you natural, yet almost perfect results. The downside of the technique is that it can eat up a lot of time. When I say a lot of time, I mean up to a couple of hours for a single image, depending on the problems that need corrections. While spending this much time on big projects or perhaps on personal projects is conceivable, for someone that shoots portraits every day and has to retouch quickly, this is simply not viable. A couple of tricks exist to help you go faster, while retaining a high quality and natural-looking image. I have listed four of them here with the hope that they will save you as much time as they do for me.

Lightroom offers us many powerful tools to adjust the brightness of some regions of a photograph. In this article, we will find out what the Basic Adjustments and the Tone Curve have in common – and what’s the difference between them.

Have you ever taken an image that looked great on the back of the camera, but upon closer inspection on a larger screen, was found to be slightly out of focus? This is a very frustrating position to be in as a photographer. This tutorial provides options to help reduce blurriness and enhance texture and detail in your images.

Masking is an important part of any decent photographer's post-production process. Sometimes, the masks are easy, but other times, they can be painfully time-consuming. However, if you learn about this hidden tool in Photoshop, your editing life will instantly become so much better.

Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer are all companies that make creatives shudder as they lament the race to the bottom of the pricing market. But, when some photographers find that they've bitten off more than they can chew, are sites like Fiverr a realistic option to get some help with editing?

About 5 years ago, when I was still in my Photography college in Australia, our teachers would regularly introduce us to the new and noteworthy Australian photographers' and digital artists' work. Among others there was one artist, whose work really grabbed my attention and I have been watching her growth and success ever since.

I’ve been exploring alternative workflows to Adobe Photoshop ever since the company forced a subscription model on its users several years ago. For all its bugginess and performance problems, I keep coming back to it, because it still spits out the highest quality images for my purposes. But some of the competition is nipping at its heels.

In this video, Christian Möhrle shows six creative ways to elevate your photos in Lightroom, such as creating a fog or light bleed effect.

All of your Lightroom development settings might be in your exported images. That's right, all of your adjustments, spot healings, tone curve adjustments, sharpening, etc. might all be in your exported files for all the world to see.

The thought of removing stray hairs in Photoshop conjures up thoughts that are equivalent to torture. It's not uncommon to hear your fellow colleagues gripe about retouching hair. However,
Michael Woloszynowicz has come to the rescue. He is becoming one of our favorites here at Fstoppers when it comes to Photoshop tutorials. Check out this efficient way in tackling stray hairs!

There are probably two main software options when it comes to the processing of Fuji raw files that most photographers tend to use, Adobe Lightroom and Capture One. The choice, however, depends on the user's personal preferences, as both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Editing landscapes can revolutionize an image that didn't quite pan out how you had intended, or bring out all the best features that did. Here are five tips that can dramatically improve your landscapes.

Dirty backgrounds are something that most of us have had to deal with at some point. Sometimes, all we need to do is clean the background. Other times, it's actually better to do a full background replacement. The full replacement can be as subtle as eliminating shadows and sensor dust or something as drastic as changing the background color. In this tutorial, we go over an easy, but precise, way to do this.

Creating an image that appears “sharp” is something I struggled with for a LONG time. I read countless articles on the topic and invested heavily in gear thinking that was the cure. While gear can certainly help, I believe there are a few key areas to focus on in order to create images that are tack sharp.

Have you ever wished there was a function in Photoshop that would just erase all the unwanted objects at the touch of a button? That dream very well may now be a reality as Aaron Nace of Phlearn shows us in this tutorial.

With Halloween fast approaching, people are either revealing the costumes they've been prepping for the past year since the last Halloween, or they're scrambling to figure out what they're going to be. However for one dad, with a custom hand made leather outfit, some know how, and a team of assistants, this Super Dad gave his 3-year-old daughter a Super Makeover. Inspired by the upcoming Wonder Woman Movie with Gal Gadot, he used some very clever photo manipulation to create the photo series.

Taking your cityscape photos during blue hour is always a safe bet if you don't get spectacular light at sunrise or sunset. A deep blue sky provides the perfect color contrast to the incandescent lights in the city and will help you create a pleasing result. But what if you are lucky with light and weather? Do you take a photo while the colors pop in the sky or with the city lights during blue hour? Luckily, you can get both by applying a technique called time blending. In this article, I show you how.

I’ve always loved the look and feel of the images created by photographer Julia Trotti and in this short video she runs you through her simple methods for creating a light and airy edit to give a very summer vibe using Lightroom.

Sending off old negatives can be time-consuming and even a little costly. Here is how you can develop film using just your camera, tripod, and a light source.

It's a very mixed feeling: you are happy they like the shot, but you are also disappointed that it's not sharp. I'm going to share my way of dealing with the situation, but I am also curious about your way of handling the problem.

Announced this morning to kick off Adobe MAX, Adobe has released a series of applications for mobile devices that are designed to increase productivity, especially when on the move. They were able to show me some of these pieces of software during a briefing last week, and I must say, these look to have incredible potential for photographers, videographers and graphic designers.

If you've often been shooting in what seems like dramatic light only to get back to your computer and realize that the images are kind of so so, then you're not alone. However, in certain situations, what seems like a dull and unimpressive image might just need a little tweaking to take it to another level.

By now, we’ve all seen the gigapixel landscape shots over the years, but I’m pretty sure never seen anything like the 900 gigapixel portrait series Swiss photographer Daniel Borschung has undertaken. I’m not much of a numbers guy, but when you have a robot arm taking 600 pictures of your subject with a macro lens, the results are a tiny bit mind blowing.

A sign at the flea market read "Creative Minds are Seldom Tidy." Do you ever feel this way? Do you ever wish you had a program that would help you organize your thoughts, your to-do's, your contacts, contracts, invoices even bank information? As a creative, often we get so caught up in our work that we forget to run our business like a business. Fortunately a new program recently launched that will help you get everything organized and automated in your business making more time for you to actually do the things you love.

Getting perfect skin tones can be quite time consuming and difficult. Because everyone's skin complexion is different, the corrections needed will be different every time. Even so, there are some recurring problems such as over-saturated reds in darker tones. A great makeup goes a long way in helping with redness, but sometimes it is not enough. The best example is the red seen in the ears when the model is backlit. Because of the nature of skin and the human body, the ears are going to turn red and no makeup will totally solve that. So let’s see how we can correct that very effectively and quickly using Photoshop.

Last year, photographer duo Dylan Howell and Sara Byrne (of Dylan and Sara Photography) posted an awesome video showing you how to create beautiful double-exposure photos in-camera, a technique popular in fine art, portrait, and wedding photography. I just stumbled across this awesome tutorial by event and wedding photographer Andrew Klokow showing you how to replicate this cool look quickly and fairly easily in Photoshop.

Our clients often hear many terms such as "megapixels," "dpi," or "resolution" and wonder what the difference is between them. As photographers, it is our job to educate them on such terms in order to lessen the confusion when they are asking for certain sizes. However, if we do not understand not only the complexity but also the simplicity of what we are talking about, do we truly understand it at all?

I have to admit it: I’ve never been on team Lightroom. This may be a bit of a low blow, but Lightroom has always seemed like the sandbox for those who couldn’t play on the big-boy playground: Photoshop, of course.

Knowing the importance of color matching strobes indoors is crucial when combining strobes and ambient lighting. Fixing mismatched lighting temperatures can be extremely difficult in post process. Ian Christmann, a commercial and lifestyle photographer discovered a method which will change your life.

You use Lightroom to process batches of images because you know how important efficiency is. But if you're not fully utilizing Lightroom's available rating (and sorting) options, you're not running as tight a ship as you could.

How many times have you snapped a beautiful scene, only to be disappointed when your images don’t adequately represent the reality? Though the camera’s images sometimes fall short, have no fear, because bracketing is here.

Affinity Photo was released over a year ago on Mac OS X. Its success on the App Store definitely shows how great the software truly is. It is also proof that people are looking at different options than the traditional Adobe workflow. Until now, one thing refrained many: Affinity Photo was available only on the Apple platform. But today is a new day and the software is now Windows compatible.

There are 10 Lightroom features I use more than any other, and many of you reading might not even be aware of them, as they're often hidden away or require sneaky keyboard shortcuts, so read on to find out what they are.

The dynamic range of a camera is something that is considered to be important. A large dynamic range is often preferred. But how can you make use of this in your photography? In this article I will explain how you can use your camera’s dynamic range in post processing.