Elements essentials
From basic retouching tricks to powerful tonal enhancements, bring your portraits to life with these simple, yet effective, edits
Mention the words Photoshop and portrait in the same sentence and most people would think of skin smoothing, body shaping and extreme beauty enhancements. But improving portraits isn’t all about heavy retouching. Most of the time, a few simple edits are all that’s required to bring out the best in your people photos. In this tutorial, we’ll explain a few key portrait edits. Most, if not all of these techniques can be used on every portrait you shoot.
We’ll begin here with a quick tidy over the face to tone down any funky marks. With little ones like this we’re more likely to find bogeys and food than pimples and wrinkles, but the same principles apply whatever the age of our subject. Once done, we’ll use a simple trick to add a darkening vignette to the edges of the photo. It’s an effect that works well with portraits, because by darkening the edges we draw the eye inwards, towards the more important areas – in this case the face. We’ll also make a few selective enhancements to the eyes, first to lighten them slightly and add contrast, then to sharpen the lashes. With any portrait, it’s worth spending time to perfect the eyes as they’re usually the first thing the viewer looks at.
Each edit we make here sits on it’s own layer in the Layers Panel. This leaves the door open to go back and tweak something later, which is helpful with portraits as there’s always an initial temptation to be over-zealous with enhancements. By working non-destructively like this, we can go back and tone things down later for natural results.