We’re sure you’ve seen photos somewhere before with a look  that you loved, that you wanted to imitate—but you couldn’t for the life of you. Trial and error doesn’t work very well here. Today we’ll teach you how to examine your favorite photo and how to use what you learn here to compose an editing approach that will give you the results you’re looking for. We’ll demonstrate all this with an example from practice. 

Quality portrait retouching doesn’t have to just mean removing a few pimples. It can be more comprehensive—and there are several different processes involved in achieving a professional portrait. So take a look at how to get ideal faces in portraits by improving not only the skin, but everything else as well.

A truly compelling picture won’t have any distractions that might steal attention from its subject. But sometimes you just can’t avoid having distractions in the shot. Fortunately you can get rid of them easily with retouching. And you’ve got several ways to do it.

In product photography, you’ll often have to use a different background for a shoot than you’ll use for the final picture. Either the “real” picture would be complicated to take, or you don’t even know what the background will be. The solution is to crop the product, erase the background, and add a new one in its place. Just these few steps can give you your dream product photos.

Taking a person from one photo and putting them in another. And thus placing them in a different situation. That’s one more thing you can do with advanced editing tools Work with layers and selections will help you to merge two photos into one like this. Take a look at how to do this kind of merging of one image into another.

Retouching is very simple and effective editing that you can use to subtly improve portraits and more. So besides fixing skin defects, you can do things like clean dirty walls or eliminate distractions on clothing or around a photographed object. And meanwhile, you can also make all of these edits non-destructively. Take a look at how to do it.

There’s a wide range of retouching techniques out there, but you may be surprised to learn that one of the most effective and universal portrait techniques is to just lighten and darken certain spots. Read on to learn how to shine with this technique.

We’d all like to think of backgrounds as simply not an issue—when we think of them at all. But in reality, backgrounds can have a lot of clutter, especially in urban photography. Meanwhile, there are several ways to look at this issue.

Hair just doesn’t get the attention it deserves in photography. And meanwhile, great-looking hair takes a photo to the next level. So sit down, read on, and learn to give hair a healthy shine with (and without) a photo editor.

The eyes are the core of a portrait, and they’re an important means of expression in photography. So let’s take a look at how to make them stand out. We’ll retouch them using a brighten-and-darken technique. And we’ll do the same to let the lips and teeth stand out. The goal: to make our subject really, really shine.