An excerpt from the Becoming a Professional Beauty Retoucher article by Julia Kuzmenko McKim
The world of professional beauty retouching is very exciting, collaborative, and diverse. You never stop learning and growing as a creative professional because every job is a set of new challenges that keep your problem-solving and retouching skills sharp and ever-evolving.
In retouching, as in any freelance career, virtually everyone begins with the simplest form of doing business – offering their services in exchange for the opportunity to develop their skillset and build their portfolio.
Then, once a freelancer feels confident enough to offer paid services, they move on to working with photographers, models, and makeup artists. And for the majority of retouching freelancers, this is the market where they choose to linger indefinitely.
Maybe this is where you want to be or maybe you are just not aware of the possibilities as a professional retouching artist.
If it’s the latter, you will be happy to find out that there’s a lot of room for growth – both professional and financial.
COURSE OUTLINE & BONUS MATERIALS
In this video course, we cover what you need to know to enter the world of professional retouching, be that as a freelancer serving commercial clients or as part of an in-house team.
Our goal is to help you improve your retouching workflow and teach you the methods, habits and techniques which are used by skilled professionals in retouching houses, as well as correct any bad habits you may have picked up by learning from other self-taught retouchers.
Chapter 1: Starting Out & Organization
- Starting Out as a Retouching Professional (watch an excerpt on the right)
- Handling Work Files
- Processing Raw Files
- Structuring Your Files Like a Pro
Chapter 2: Mastering Curves and Dodge & Burn
- Mastering Curves
- Mastering Dodge & Burn
- Natural Beauty Retouch for Female Portrait (from start to finish)
Chapter 3: Professional Selections & Masking
- Professional Selections & Masking
- Advanced Masking
- Luminosity Masking
- Precise Masking with Select & Mask
Chapter 4: Working With Colors
- Color Theory & Management In Practice
- Recoloring Methods
- Backgrounds and Banding
Chapter 5: Frequency Separation & More
- Frequency Separation
- Drawing Hair, Lashes & Brows
- Smart Objects
- Natural Beauty Retouch for Studio Beauty (from start to finish)
BONUS MATERIALS
- RA Lash, Brow & Hair Custom Brushes
- Pro Retouching Vocabulary for a working pro
- Successful Job Application Checklist
- An email sequence to help you apply what you have learned in your career, and find and keep new high profit clients.
Be sure to read the Becoming a Professional Beauty Retoucher article by Julia Kuzmenko McKim here.
COURSE PURPOSE
This 5-hour video course is a technical guide for retouching artists of any level interested in ultimately serving commercial clients in the beauty industry. It will also help self-taught retouchers to unlearn bad habits and increase their chances at getting and keeping commercial clients, be it through working with beauty brands directly, or via their commercial photographers and retouching studios.
We cover different areas of expertise required for a retouching professional from business etiquette to file handling, file structure and the most commonly used professional retouching techniques. We also walk you through a couple of full retouches from start to finish with varying goals and approaches.
Although we go over a few important fundamental subjects such as the Curves, Selecting and Masking, we teach you how these tools, features, workflow and techniques are used in the professional environment.
Digital Guide Preview:
