Most of my portrait retouching involves correcting mistakes made during the photo shoot. Common issues include unflattering lighting, poor camera angle, crooked clothing, stray hairs, and distracting backgrounds.
More recently, I’ve been asked to repair the work of amateur retouchers. This means the customer, or their friend, tried to edit the portrait themselves.
Inexperienced editing often leaves obvious signs behind: visible brush strokes, harsh transitions, heavy-handed skin smoothing, halos around the subject, too much saturation, over sharpening, and poor use of the Clone Stamp tool. Any of these can make a portrait look artificial and unprofessional.
Always Save The Original Photo
The biggest challenge for me is that the original, untouched image is often gone. The customer, or their friend, edited the original and saved over it without first making a backup.
This leaves me with a second generation image that has already lost detail, resolution, and editing flexibility. Every round of destructive editing makes it harder to produce a natural, high-quality result.
If you’re learning retouching, that’s great. Everyone begins somewhere.
Just remember one essential rule: always work on a copy of the original image. Keep the original file untouched, no exceptions. It serves as your safety net if something goes wrong. It also preserves the maximum amount of image data, and gives you the option to change the edit in the future.
