A Complete Guide to Editing a Portrait in Photoshop

Lighting and taking a great portrait is certainly a challenge, but it is only half of what it takes to create a compelling image, as you will need to have top editing skills in addition. This excellent video tutorial will show you how to edit a portrait in Photoshop from start to finish.

Coming to you from Eli Infante, this great video tutorial will show you how to edit a portrait in Photoshop, including frequency separation, dodging and burning, and color grading. All three of these techniques are quite powerful and versatile and can go a long way to creating both a technically competent and stylistically sound image, but of course, with such robust capabilities, it is also very easy to go overboard and end up creating a result that looks overly artificial or plastic. To mitigate this, I almost instinctively keep my left hand on the keyboard shortcut to zoom out and check things every few minutes to make sure I am not going overboard. It is easy to lose sight of the overall edit when you are zoomed in or even when you have been working on the image for a while, as you will begin to develop a bit of tunnel vision, and this can help keep you in check. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Infante. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

Not a fan of plastic skin...

Video is excellent as are his other ones. I bought his 2021 actions - excellent I thought. Maybe he is well known but I never heard of him. He gives very good explanations on his processing. One to follow Eli Infante.