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Beauty Retouching, Commercial Retouching, Real World Practices, Working With Colors

How Good are Your Color Matching Skills?

As a retouching professional in the beauty industry, you have to hone certain skills to be able to make necessary color adjustments to achieve target (reference) colors provided by the client. These skills include: the ability to discern subtle differences...

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Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

How To Use Luma Masks for Precise Adjustments in Capture One Pro 12

Luminosity masks are a useful tool for manipulating color, texture, as well as contrast. This feature, coined "Luma Masks," joins Capture One Pro 12, allowing you to easily create masks based on the Luma Range of a file. For retouching,...

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Beauty Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Quick Color Change Techniques That Every Retoucher Should Know

Retouching assignments stretch beyond skin and hair, often requiring precise color adjustments. Eye color, makeup, jewelry, various aspects of an image may need fine-tuning to achieve the desired result for your own creative direction, or at the behest of...

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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Using Luminosity Masking and Blend If Sliders in Photoshop

Luminosity Masks and making use of Blend If are two phenomenal ways to gain precise control over the tonal range of your image. In general, these tools grant you the ability to make accurate selections for manipulating the dynamic...

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Understanding The Color Composition of an Image
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Commercial Retouching, Fundamentals, Working With Colors

Understanding the Color Composition of an Image

If you're a new photographer just starting to produce your shoots, you might mistakingly think that post-production and/or color grading is what makes the "look" or "feel" of a photograph. Analyzing the use of color in an...

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default develop settings in lightroom
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

How to Change the Default Develop Settings in Lightroom

The way color is captured in-camera can differ between brands, models, and lenses. When you first import your photographs to your RAW Converter of choice, you may find yourself making the same adjustments again and again. Or,...

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color correcting skin tones in photoshop
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Fundamentals, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Color Correcting Skin Tones With Adjustment Layers In Photoshop

Getting skin tones to look natural and flattering in your photographs can sometimes be a challenge. There are many causes of incorrect colors in-camera, from inaccurate White Balance to random colors from the subjects' surroundings reflected onto the captured...

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why you should color calibrate your display for retouching
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Why You Should Color Calibrate Your Monitor

Accuracy is imperative for a retoucher, as your goal is creating a perfected final product. Color accuracy is one of those aspects of post-production that is vitally important, especially for commercial or editorial imagery. There is nothing more frustrating than...

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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Did You Know Vivid Light Blending Mode is Great For Color Grading?

Color plays a vital role in photography and is often the marker of a skilled artist versus a beginner. When crafting one’s style and visual aesthetic, the way one tones their images can say a lot about their body...

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photoshop tricks and hacks for retouching
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

These 19 Hacks Will Help You Improve Your Retouching in Photoshop

To stay relevant and marketable in this highly competitive industry, it’s important to keep your skills sharp and to constantly learn new and improved ways to get the job done. Photoshop is a tool of our trade, but with...

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retouching beauty portraits in lightroom
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Beauty Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

How to Retouch Portraits in Adobe Lightroom

Adobe applications have become more accessible than ever, making Lightroom a popular choice among photographers and retouchers. While many have fit Lightroom into their workflow for organizing, batch processing, and basic adjustments, Lightroom in and of itself is a...

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using lightroom to color grade a video in premiere
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Color Grade Your Videos Using LUTs From Lightroom

Color Look Up Tables (or LUTs) can give your images a distinct look and feel though their colors. In our recent LUT-related article, you learned how to use LUTs in Photoshop to color grade an image, and this video tutorial...

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using the color grading options in lightroom
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

Demystifying the HSL Tool in Lightroom

One of the most overlooked tools in Lightroom is the HSL (Hue, Saturation, and Luminance) color adjustment window. If you’re just beginning your journey into editing your images and learning Lightroom, you’ll find that HSL is a powerful color grading tool...

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get perfect skin tones using curves adjustment in photoshop
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Beauty Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

4 Great Methods to Perfect Skin Tones Using Curves in Photoshop

Correcting and controlling color, especially in skin tones, is an imperative part of the retouching process. Skin tone can be impacted by a variety of causes, such as lighting setups, the surrounding environment, as well as how the camera...

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Fundamentals, Hardware & Tools, Working With Colors

Using a Color Chart to Ensure Color Accuracy in Your Photography from Capture to Resulting Image

Color accuracy is an important factor in photography and retouching. Modern day cameras rely entirely on the built-in software to interpret the color data in the captured images, and how the colors are captured will be a direct reflection...

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how to remove color fringe from hair in photoshop
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Real World Practices, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

How to Remove Color Fringing From Hair in Photoshop

Hair can sometimes feel like the bane of a retoucher’s existence, due to the visual complexity of hair and the various techniques you need to know to handle it correctly. If you need to remove a subject from their background,...

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RA_Blog_Feat_900px_How_to_Perfectly_Color_Match_Your_Composites
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Creative Retouching, Fundamentals, Working With Colors

Super Quick Technique For Easy Color Matching Elements In Your Images

Love it or hate it, compositing is a common part of digital imaging today. Whether you’re superimposing a model onto a different than captured background, or compositing a series of product photos together for a commercial campaign, a uniform...

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color grading with split toning in lightroom
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

How to Use Split Toning to Color Grade Your Images in Lightroom

Color grading photographs is an essential part of retouching, as beautiful skin and hair can be undermined by a poor use of color. There is no shortage of methods for manipulating color, which can range from complicated to simplistic. Split...

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hidden tricks and hacks in lightroom for retouching workflow
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

5 Hidden Tricks for Speeding up Your Workflow in Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is a robust application with hundreds of tools, making it very possible to discover entirely new techniques years into using it. Lightroom is not just a powerful RAW Converter, but it is a fantastic program for organizing...

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retouching natural light fashion with julia trotti
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Software for Retouching, Video Tutorial, Working With Colors

How to Retouch Natural Light Photographs in Lightroom and Photoshop

Photography captured outdoors with natural light is typically the starting point for many new photographers, and the approach to retouching those images is often entirely different from studio shots. This excellent video by Sydney-based fashion photographer, Julia Trotti, goes...

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