The Art of Retouching - Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom Retouching Tutorials

Do you see that toolbar that runs along the top of Photoshop, below the main menu? That is the Options bar. The Options bar changes depending on the tool that you have selected. For instance, if we click on the Eyedropper tool, the Options bar changes into the different options and settings specifically for the Eyedropper tool only. As we go further in this whole Retouching for Beginners crash course, we’ll eventually get to the nitty-gritty of every single tool and their corresponding Options.

The Info Palette shows you different information about your image, based on your selected tool. It will tell you about color breakdown, measurements, and other useful tidbits.

Eager beaver beginners usually just want to start editing photos without even giving much thought to settings and preferences. This is a big no-no, which is precisely why amateurs make this mistake all the time. Preferences greatly affect the workflow of your photos depending on how you want to edit them, so your road to Photoshop excellence starts with the “boring” settings people so often skip. There have been a ton of versions for Photoshop over the years, but here we’ll be talking about the Preferences for the latest version called Photoshop CC. If you’re interested to find out about the older versions’ Preferences, you can check out the videos for Photoshop CS5 and CS6 right here on my website.

Once you’re inside Photoshop, you come face to face with all these tools, palettes, and seemingly random symbols. Add that to a boring interface and you just might give up on Photoshop right from the start. I’m telling you now that there’s nothing to be afraid of, because we’ll tackle basic navigation through all these palettes to ensure that it’s easy-breezy. And when we’re done, you’ll realize that the interface is no more daunting than a fluffy little bunny.

So you took a lovely shot of the perfect night sky, and now you want to start retouching it. When you drag this image onto Photoshop, the first thing it does is not really open it up in Photoshop but in Camera Raw. You’re taken to this interface that all seems foreign to you, with buttons and sliders and you’re thinking, “What in the world just happened?” I’m going to clear up your confusion straight away. Camera Raw is an extremely easy-to-use raw processor that’s built into Photoshop. It handles your raw image before you open it up in Photoshop, and believe it or not, most of the time when I’m done teaching Camera Raw to my students, they don’t even want to use Photoshop anymore. Counterproductive, or just incredibly awesome? Don’t just take my word for it—let’s dive right in.

This short clip will teach you all about Camera Raw Filter, a powerful tool available in Photoshop CC. It basically lets you treat a pixel-based image as a raw file and make adjustments to it. How does that happen?

After all of the techniques and tools that we talked about, you are now ready to see all these concepts applied into a single image. This tutorial will show you how to actually retouch a photo using all the knowledge you’ve just acquired, all done in a truely non-destructive workflow.

We’ve discussed the wonder of Smart Objects, but it does get confusing for some people, especially for a beginner. This tutorial will teach you workarounds when it comes to working with Smart Objects, and will get rid of your fear of meddling with these seemingly tricky situations.

This session will tell you all about the magic of Smart Objects and Smart Filters. For any retoucher, it’s important to develop a non-destructive workflow. Smart Objects and Smart Filters will give you the ability to go back and forth between your actions without permanently damaging your photo. For example, after many hours of work, I had 7 images needed to be blown up approximately 170%. The client failed to mention that part. Instead of having to blow up pixel data, or start over again; I was able to simply go back to Camera Raw, and output the images blown up (which were way sharper than Photoshop’s pixel data). Simply dragging over the existing Adjustment Layers, Masks, and Smart Filters; I was able to give the sharpest image possible, without much trouble.

Because of all the fancy tools that Camera Raw comes packed with, it’s easy to overlook certain settings that are actually very important. This tutorial will briefly go over the significance of knowing how Camera Raw exports images to Photoshop. Determining your output options will make the work that you do, whether it’s for printing or for magazines or simply for web display, much more convenient. Below your image in Camera Raw, you will see a line of blue text that tells you specific details about your picture. Clicking on this blue text opens up the “Workflow Options” dialog box, where you can set up your color profile, bit depth, image size, etc.

This Photoshop tutorial teaches you how to isolate certain areas of a photo using Local Adjustments in Camera Raw. Does one cheek of your model look a little too flushed? Is a particular part of the leg covered in unnecessary shadows? You can make your changes specifically to that section alone, without affecting the other areas of your image.

This Photoshop Tutorial teaches you the difference between opening up a raw file from Camera Raw as “Open Image” or as “Open Object”. While the former opens up your image as it is, the latter lets you make changes on your raw files , even after you have started working in Photoshop. It does this by opening up your images as Smart Objects. Even if you do not fully use the power of Smart Objects, this tutorial will show you how, even in the simplest method possible, it will easily change the way you work on your images in Photoshop.

The wonderfully convenient thing about Camera Raw, is that it’s incredibly easy to learn your way around it. Its simple interface and easy to use tools will only take minutes to get the hang of; as opposed to taking many hours trying become barely competent in Photoshop. You’ll see just how effortless it is to retouch your raw photos. So open up one of your raw images in Photoshop’s Camera Raw and let’s get started.

Many people wonder what the differences are, between Camera Raw, Photoshop, and Lightroom. To be clear, each one serves a very different function in your Post-Production Workflow. Lightroom is a database that displays your images as thumbnails so that you can organize them into collections, tag them with metadata, and easily export batches out for web, slideshows or print. Lightroom and Camera Raw are both raw processors. Camera Raw is built into Photoshop and allows for quick raw processing. Lastly, Photoshop is a powerful image editing software used to handle the small details.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time playing around with the RAW format, so it’s only practical for us to go over a quick overview of the various RAW processors in the market today. There’s a variety of choices out there, so don’t feel like your options are limited. While these are something we are not necessarily recommending over Photoshop’s built-in Camera Raw, it’s still good to lay it all out for you to have a choice.