Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop

by Scott Kelby

Each year, Scott Kelby, Editor-in-Chief of "Photoshop User" magazine and the #1 best-selling Photoshop author, trains literally thousands of photographers on how to retouch portraits using Photoshop through his live seminars, online classes, DVDs, and standing-room only workshops at the Photoshop World Conference & Expo. Now you can learn the same techniques he uses in his own retouching workflow, in the only book of its kind-one written expressly for photographers who do their own retouching.

As a pro photographer himself, Scott understands that photographers make their living shooting, not retouching. But, delivering fully retouched images is now expected by clients. That's why Scott put together this amazing resource for teaching photographers the quickest, easiest, and most effective ways to create professional-looking, retouched final images without spending hours grinding away at painstaking, detailed techniques.
LEARN HOW THE PROS DO IT

It's all here-the step-by-step methods for fixing, enhancing, and finishing your portraits in Photoshop. Using the techniques in this book, you'll create images that will absolutely wow your clients. You'll learn:
- How to soften skin and still retain detail and texture
- The best tricks for beautifully enhancing eyes, eyebrows, and eyelashes
- How to selectively sharpen portraits without complicated masking
- How to create gorgeous-looking lips
- How to remove blemishes fast and keep the most detail
- The pros' tricks for body sculpting
- How to make your subject's hair look fabulous
- How to give your retouches that natural look that sets them apart
- Plus, you get Scott's complete 5-minute, 15-minute, and 30-minute start-to-finish workflows

If you're ready to learn the "tricks of the trade"-the same ones that today's leading pro photographers use to retouch, tuck, tighten, and tone their images for that pro-retouched look-you're holding the book that will do exactly that. It will radically change the way you retouch your portraits from here on out, and give you the best-looking, most natural retouches you've ever done.

Genres: Photography

375 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Scott Kelby is an American author and publisher of periodicals dealing in Macintosh and Personal Computer software, specifically for design professionals, photographers, and artists.

Kelby is editor and publisher of Photoshop User and Layers magazines, president and co-founder of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and is president of Kelby Media Group, an Oldsmar, Florida-based software training, education, and publishing firm.
Kelby is a photographer, designer, and the award-winning author of more than 40 books.

Reviews

[Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very, very basic and most of these techniques are rather sloppy. I am a huge fan of Scott Kelby but he really seems to believe that if you can't do something in two minutes it isn't worth doing. Almost all of the professional retouchers I know totally disagree.

[Karissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few photography books that I didn't regret investing on! Easy to understand and amazing techniques that I had never seen before! Truly something only Scott Kelby can accomplish!

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is like a cookbook of lots of techniques Kelby uses to touch up and tweak his portraits. Since he's a photographer and not a retoucher, he tends to go for the quick and dirty solutions that should work 95% of the time. The layout of the book is helpful in that every tip is fully self-contained - you can flip directly to anything (like removing redness in the eyes, softening skin, taming hair) and have all the steps for it included.

I read it cover to cover and so found parts of it repetitive (copy the background layer, add an adjustment layer, mask to limit the effect to the area you're sizing, adjust opacity to moderate the effect. Repeat... Oops. Does that count as spoilers?) but when used as a deskside reference, it's going to be extra handy.

There are a few sneaky tricks though (like when to work on a single color channel, stacking layers of different sharpness, and when adding a little blur is a good thing) so it's definitely got some nuggets of wisdom in it that a newbie probably wouldn't think of.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only skimmed through this one since I'm away from my photoshop computer, but as always, this is classic Kelby, who provides some solid quick techniques and will undoubtedly improve my process, which currently involved similar solutions to his own, but rather a lot more inelegant on my part. I'm particularly fascinated by the eyelash collection brushes and can't wait to try those out.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I'm using a later version of Photoshop, but I found some of the methods described to be destructive. In a number of places, I could think of different ways of making adjustments that could be saved and readjusted later.

Otherwise, it's a good book in typical relaxed Kelby style that makes it easy to understand and follow.

[Miko Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful book! Quite a few things that I was already doing, but often using different techniques to get the result (it's always good to have alternatives), as well as more drastic tweaks that I'd never used before. Would definitely recommend this for anyone who shoots portraits.

[Dina Omar · Rating 3 out of 5]

nice but not excellent ,, not all techniques are the professional one

[Deana Brougham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its one of those books you are never done with!