26 Professional Photoshop Retouching Tutorials

Jul 15 2009 by Tomas Laurinavicius | 108 Comments | Stumble Bookmark

Adobe Photoshop is the go-to tool for digital artists when it comes to professionally retouching images. Enhancing and retouching photos in Photoshop is an effective way to "work with what you’ve got".

There are many tips, tricks, and techniques for improving things like skin tone and imperfections, and enhancing the photo subject’s features. This article shares a huge variety of photo retouching tutorials for Photoshop users with brief descriptions of each.

1. Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching

Learn how to improve a poorly taken photograph by reducing its noise in this Photoshop subject-enhancing tutorial. You will also discover a fast and simple way for smoothing out a person’s skin with realistic results.

2. Reducing 5 O’Clock Shadow And Beard Stubble In Photoshop

You can learn how to lower the amount of beard stubbles a person has by reading this excellent Photoshop retouching tutorial. The tutorial covers layer masking techniques, effective usage of the Healing Brush Tool, and layer blending options.

3. Virtual Makeup in a Snap

This tutorial goes over an easy method for digitally applying makeup on a subject for a beautiful and realistic outcome. Some Photoshop tools and features used are the Reduce Noise Filter, the Paint Brush Tool, and the Eraser Tool.

4. Eye Color Change

You can use Photoshop to change a photo subject’s eye color by reading through this tutorial that shares a simple method for doing so using Quick Mask Mode and Color Balance Image Adjustments.

5. Increase Breast Size

Learn a technique for augmenting the photo subjects breast size (often used in print magazines) using the Liquify Filter and the Bloat Tool in this quick and easy Photoshop tutorial.

6. Basic Retouch and Colorization

Learn the basics of photo retouching and enhancing a photos color by way of the colorization method. The Gaussian Blur filter, Curves image adjustment, and the Smart Sharpen filter are just some of the options applied in this Photoshop tutorial.

7. Applying Realistic Tattoo

If you would like to apply a digitally placed tattoo on a subject’s body – perhaps either to cover up imperfections or to make them look badass – this tutorial goes over a method that offers realistic results.

8. Age Progression

Retouching usually aims to reduce aging in someone’s features, but what if you wanted to do the opposite? In this retouching/enhancing tutorial – you’ll learn a method for realistically aging someone’s facial features.

9. Whiten Teeth to Improve a Smile in Photoshop

Learn to brighten the subject’s teeth for a pearly-white smile in this Photoshop tutorial that uses the Quick Selection Tool for easy area selection and a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer to get the job done.

10. Professional Photo Retouching Bikini Model

In this tutorial, you’ll learn professional methods for enhancing a bikini model photo. Find several Photoshop techniques such as removing unwanted skin blemishes and a digital airbrushing process.

11. Change Hair Color

You can enhance a photo subject by altering their natural features. One way to end up with eye-grabbing results is by changing a person’s hair color; this Photoshop tutorial shows you how to do it with basic masking tools and layer styles.

12. Superb Skin Airbrush Technique

Airbrushing is used by professional makeup artists to prepare subjects for photo shoots. In this retouching tutorial, you’ll discover how to perform this process digitally with the help of Photoshop tools such as the Surface Blur Filter and the Paint Brush Tool.

13. Face Makeover

This professional-level Photoshop tutorial goes over the ways in which you can give someone a full digital makeover, including how to whiten eyes to make the subject look more vibrant, using the Paint Brush Tool in conjunction with lay blending modes.

14. Simple Facial Photo Retouching

The Spot Healing Brush Tool, the Warp Transform option, and downloadable Photoshop brushes are some of the things this excellent facial retouching tutorial on Grafpedia utilizes to enhance the eye area of the photo subject.

15. Create Digital Makeup

In this Photoshop photo-enhancing tutorial, you will find out how to apply makeup digitally onto a photo subject using a couple of Photoshop filters, masking tools, and Image Adjustment options.

16. Artificial Smooth Skin

This quick and easy beginner level Photoshop tutorial goes over some basic masking methods using the Quick Mask Mode and the Paint Brush Tool to smoothen a person’s facial skin for a flawless surface, a technique used in many print magazines.

17. Professional Photographic Retouching

In this video tutorial on Abduzeedo, you’ll observe methods that professionals use in order to enhance the subject of a photograph. Color correction, reshaping of body features, and adjusting depth of field are just some of the things covered in here.

18. Easy Digital Nose Job in Photoshop

This detailed, step-by-step Adobe Photoshop tutorial covers a technique for enhancing a person’s nose. The Lasso Tool, Free Transform, and the Healing Brush Tool are the main Photoshop features utilized in this process.

19. Professional Photo-Retouching

In this Photoshop retouching video tutorial, you will get to see a method for digitally adjusting someone’s hair. The tutorial goes over removing unwanted parts of the hair, adjusting tonal values, and working with blending modes.

20. Quick and Effective Facial Retouching

What’s great about Photoshop is that you can often get exceptional results in a short amount of time. This step-by-step Photoshop face retouching tutorial goes over how to achieve realistic and impressive results in a matter of minutes.

21. How to Digitally Paint Lip Gloss with a Tablet

Apply lip-gloss to a photo subject by reading through this Photoshop retouching tutorial that uses the Liquify Filter and Photoshop brush techniques to add some sheen to a person’s lips.

22. Remove Blemishes in Photoshop

The Spot Healing Brush Tool, the Gaussian Blur Filter, and the Paint Brush Tool are the subjects of this easy to follow and highly illustrative Photoshop retouching tutorial featured on Tutorialboard.

23. How To Get Perfect Skin!

This easy-to-follow and extremely detailed Photoshop tutorial shows you how to improve a photo subject’s skin features with just two tools: the Healing Brush Tool and the Clone Stamp Tool.

24. Glamour Model

This photo-retouching tutorial outlines several handy techniques for improving an image, such as taking advantage of the Patch Tool for skin blemishes and using the Turbulence Tool for smooth pixel scattering and for blurring out imperfections.

25. Really Cool Digital Make up in Photoshop in 10 min

Here is a Photoshop tutorial for applying realistic makeup on photos; it utilizes the Dust & Speckle Noise Filter as a layer mask and Shadow/Highlight Image Adjustments to enhance your images swiftly and painlessly.

26. Retouch Yellow Skin

You can lighten and soften a person’s skin tone and texture by following along this excellent Photoshop tutorial that uses options such as the Soft Light layer mode, Selective Color Image Adjustments and Curves Image Adjustments.

Got a photo retouching tip?

If you know of a good resource or tip on how to digitally-enhance a photo subject, please share it with the rest of us in the comments. * Edited by Jacob Gube

About the Author

Tomas Laurinavičius is interested in web design, graphic design and web development, based in Lithuania. He’s also the founder of Iniwoo, a site about photoshop, web design, wordpress and inspiration. If you’d like to connect with him, you can follow him on Twitter.

108 Comments

Johnson Koh

July 16th, 2009

Thanks for including my tutorial in this great list ;)

smigoo

July 16th, 2009

Wonderful!Thanx!~

Imokon

July 16th, 2009

Yea those were the days. I need to get back into that, thanks :)

vik

July 16th, 2009

Very good collection

warzazi

July 16th, 2009

nice collection Tomas !
awesome tutos ..

Matt S

July 16th, 2009

Nice list, thanks for sharing! I’ll find most (if not all) of these useful as I’ve recently gotten into Photography and would like to try adding some glamour in PhotoShop to everyday people, :).

Alex C.

July 16th, 2009

Awesome list my friend!
Really useful tutorials!

izzat

July 16th, 2009

nice list of tutorials..thanks for sharing all these :) I’m a newbie in photography and in progress to master some editing technique on portraiture and your list help me a lot! thanks again.

web2000

July 16th, 2009

So I guess the saying “believe half of what you see” is only partially true when it comes to the innawebs.

Vicky

July 16th, 2009

Do you not want female readers anymore? Some of these tutorials are sickening. Guys like the author, Tomas Laurinavičius, need to stop spreading this women-are-just-objects thought.

Jaime DM

July 16th, 2009

Nice tutorials, I’ve already seen some of them but anyway they are still stunning.

Really love they are all in a same place. :D

Bariski

July 16th, 2009

Awesome post man, done on all socials. Thanks :D

Boomer

July 16th, 2009

Great tutorials. Simple and straightforward. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Many thanks!

Jillian

July 16th, 2009

Seriously? I think most of these look overly-done and terrible. The “increase breast size” picture made the hair bend in an unrealistic way. The whitened teeth one looks ridiculously fake. Most of this is the kind of stuff that ends up on photoshopdisasters.com.

Sarah

July 16th, 2009

Wow, about 90% of these tutorials totally abuse the Blur tool… which is great if you want people to look like plastic Barbie dolls.

Efrain

July 16th, 2009

good post……ugly peolple there you have

BryanRegencia

July 16th, 2009

Awesome! thanks for sharing.

Havana

July 16th, 2009

Man.

Photoshop causes bulimia, it seems. LOL

Tim Smith

July 17th, 2009

Thanks for the great round-up! I really need to brush up on my Photoshop retouching skills so, this is really going to come in handy.

darn

July 17th, 2009

no dont share these cause ugly people will use them on their facebook and myspace, then people like me might fall for it and then meet them in real life and be like “dame it”

Tomas Laurinavičius

July 17th, 2009

@Vicky This is not my fault. Just more lessons are to women. I simply collect the best tutorials.

However the main idea of this article is to learn photoshop subtleties, and not to discriminate women.

faru

July 17th, 2009

awesome tuts..!!!can u pls upload some matte painting tutorials??.thank u

bill

July 17th, 2009

This would totally benefit from the jQuery before/after plugin.

bill

July 17th, 2009

http://www.catchmyfame.com/?p=150

robb

July 22nd, 2009

one list to rule them all.
very nice.
thx for sharing.

Barbara J Carter

July 24th, 2009

Frankly, in most cases I liked the “before” better than the “after.”

Amira

July 26th, 2009

I love all these tutorials except for the changing of eye color so i created a better tutorial. Check it out, dont for get to rate it, let me know what you think.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5217069_change-eye-color-photoshop.html

Jasmin Halkić

July 31st, 2009

Awesome article!

Kylie

August 22nd, 2009

It’s just Photoshop. You need to get over the ”women discrimination” thing.

Some of these tutorials are extremely good, magazine like. Thanks for sharing!

Arun M

August 31st, 2009

Nice tutorials. Thanks

Clarity

September 5th, 2009

Outstanding article.

poopsmith

September 10th, 2009

yeah i like the before pictures better. i like real life, real people, which is hard to find unless you are actually seeing somebody in person anymore. thanks photoshop and internet for making everyone think they are a “graphic artist”. and every other time i hit my stumbleupon button, it comes up with some website claiming to have the “70 bagillion best photoshop tutorials” or something similar. how…un-unique. that being said, i can’t photoshop for crap, nor do i want to, so if you have the skills then good for you, that’s awesome.

Mahmudur Rahman

September 13th, 2009

Excellent article Tomas, one of the best i think , thanks for shearing…

Kar

September 13th, 2009

Why are 90% of these touch-up tutorials always featuring women and how to make them busty/perfect/blemish-free? I’m so sick this shit.

Robert

September 15th, 2009

@Kar AHAHAHA! stumbled…

S

September 18th, 2009

A little too much of the blur-tool there.
When you can’t see pores, NO ONE believes the photo. Even in the most retouched ads (and I’m talking ads in magazines like Allure and Cosmo) you can still see some light hair on the cheeks/some skin texture.

A picture with no skin texture is not only unbelievable, it makes the image plunge very quickly into uncanny-valley territory. Seriously.

Not the best tuts, sorry.

ern

September 24th, 2009

Wow. How to create plastic-looking skin. Hey, I’ve been looking for a tutorial for that! Idiots.

me

October 28th, 2009

Come on, these are just photoshop techniques, where and how you apply them is up to each person *eye roll*

Sammy

November 24th, 2009

Ick … plastic skin. I have been taking photo retouching lessons from modelphotoretouching.com . Patience and skill… my friend.

André Weigel

December 14th, 2009

Great blog post… thank you !

jagoanweb

December 17th, 2009

fantastic… :))

haydara

December 21st, 2009

hello how do you do
ok it’s nice sites and awsome tutrials we realy thank you alot
so have a nice day and nice tut.
thanks a lot

Allingame

January 31st, 2010

Wow! Very helpful tutorials

PhotoMaster

February 1st, 2010

THIS IS ALL ABOUT PHOTOSHOP LEARNING. PLEASE DON’T BE STUPID OR IDIOT ENOUGH TO MAKE COMMENT OUT OF THE TOPIC.

I BELIEVE ALL WOMEN IN THE WORLD ALWAYS WANT TO BE MORE BEAUTIFUL FOR TOMORROW THAN WHAT THEY ARE TODAY. IF THEY DON’T THEN THEY ARE PROBABLY NOT REAL WOMAN.

IF YOU ARE UGLY… JUST DON’T BLAME ANYONE ELSE. IT’S GOD WHO MAKES YOU JUST LIKE THAT.

IF YOU ARE NOT SATISFIED, THEN YOU CAN RETOUCH YOUR FACE… AND THE ONE IS USING PHOTOSHOP. LOL.

PEACE. :)
BEAUTIFUL LADY HERE.

Daniel Meadows

February 15th, 2010

There’s way too much gaussian blur going on here, although the aging tutorial is impressive and informed. The ‘over-photoshopping’ that people talk of is usually the exact opposite, corner-cutting looks awful and unnatural. A masked gaussian/surface blur is absolutely no substitute for pixel level dodging and burning, this stuff takes hours not minutes.

mukesh

March 27th, 2010

there are many nice tutorials thanks for this

Aprilidya

April 3rd, 2010

COOL! thanks for sharing ;)

Azizuan

April 8th, 2010

thanks for the roundup

capunk

April 14th, 2010

cool…

purvi

April 15th, 2010

its realy usefull. cool:::
thanks 4 this

Saud

April 16th, 2010

nice collection!

masima

April 17th, 2010

Thank u so machhhhhh!!!!!!!

subhendu

April 25th, 2010

that’s very good work man. its help me lot. thanks

Dulce Bieschke

April 29th, 2010

I have visited your site before. Outstanding boudoir photography. BTW you have a georgous web site

Tweek Hub

May 29th, 2010

It is always useful to know how to make people look better!

http://tweekhub.com – Making people look better since 2008.

Al Kamal Md. Razib

June 12th, 2010

Great photo retouching and enhancing! I really enjoy this.

nunu

June 15th, 2010

nice abstrast fine methodes

Rokaiya Yeasmin Munni

June 24th, 2010

I think these tutorials is more details and easier for any one who want to modify any picture by retouching. Thanks for sharing.

David Tong

June 25th, 2010

Hi, I’d like to contribute my skin-enhancing article as well.

http://reviews.davidleetong.com/?p=1102

PSO

July 1st, 2010

That is really awesome, also I would like to contribute our expert work.. http://www.photoshopsociety.org/tutorial.php

Barbara

July 2nd, 2010

Nice roundup. I will try the age progression. I hope not to be afraid of the result !

Alessio

July 6th, 2010

Best tutorial list! Well done.

I’m serching for a “PLASTIC SKIN” tutorial..

can u help me?

Thanks!

Dj_morex

July 30th, 2010

Thankx!! they are really useful. keep up the good job ;o)

arya

August 6th, 2010

thanks…you have a good tutorial….

J.Hesham

August 20th, 2010

awesome tutorials !

metalpig

August 30th, 2010

Great list of Photoshop tuts! :)
Thanks! =)

samz

September 4th, 2010

Awsome!

Brett Widmann

October 21st, 2010

This is so amazing. I can’t wait to try some of these out myself

sujanroy

October 23rd, 2010

speech less

white

November 9th, 2010

speech less too

alice

November 23rd, 2010

Hey, I want to know which Photoshop are you using with this Retouching stuff? I have CS5 on my computer..and i tried to use those steps like yourself, but it seems I don’t have all of the steps/tools in my photoshop =/ and I can’t do such stufd to the end like you.. PLEASE HELP? Thanks for answering.

Soe Moe

November 30th, 2010

The best retouch collection that i ever seen

Atilla

December 1st, 2010

thanx, good job nice tutorial

octavianusb

December 19th, 2010

This is what i looking for. Thx for the effort!

Sudesh Angre

December 20th, 2010

It’s really cool. Thanks for improving my phoshop knowledge

RandyD

December 25th, 2010

These tutorials are great for those who want to learn how to edit a photo quickly. I don’t think they are intended for someone who wants to do professional level editing. And that’s okay. Images that may look too plastic can be toned down by using different values but still use the same tools as in the lessons. In the change eye color tutorial for example, the mask overlaps part of the lashes and the color change is applied to the lashes. In a non professional photo, no one will notice. If it’s professional, it likely will be caught. These are quick ways to edit and help learn what the tools do. And with that in mind, they work.