High-end beauty portrait retouching through the use of local corrective dodging and burning

posted Wednesday, July 19, 2017 at 11:30 AM EDT

There's an art to portrait retouching. It can be such a difficult thing to do that many large commercial shoots have dedicated retouchers and some photographers relegate some or all of their retouching work to specialists. Others, like photographer Chris Knight, have become highly skilled at the portrait process from start to finish. Like many aspects of editing photos in Photoshop, retouching comes with a large variety of techniques and methods for achieving similar final results. In the video below, Knight shows how to perform local and corrective dodging and burning when retouching beauty portraits.

The video below shows how to even out skin tones in particular and accompanies Knight's book, "The Dramatic Portrait: The Art of Crafting Light and Shadow." Natural-looking skin in portraits can be very difficult to achieve. You don't want, especially in beauty portraits, to have a lot of tonal imperfections. But on the other hand, you want the people in your photos to look, for lack of a better way to put it, like people. Some of how you apply the technique to your work below relies on personal preference, but it's important to get the technique in your arsenal.