6 Quick Photoshop Postprocessing Video Tutorials

Have you ever wanted to improve your photo retouching skills in Photoshop?  Have you ever been curious about how to look at a photo and determine what needs to be corrected and improved in it?  If so, you’re not alone.  Here are 6 great video tutorials that show many basic techniques that you can apply to your photos to make them look more professional.  For the most part, they demonstrate these skills in Photoshop CS3, but they should all work relatively similar in all versions of Photoshop.  Some of the techniques covered are:

• Using levels adjustments to set the tonal range of your picture and make the colors pop
• Enhancing the shadows and highlights using a curves adjustment layer
• Altering the color balance (a.k.a. white balance) to make the photo warmer or cooler
• Employing the liquify filter to slim the subject’s waist and alter other body features
• Changing the saturation to make the colors look more vivid while keeping skin tones in tact
• Burning and dodging to put the viewer’s focus on the subject of the image
• Fixing dark “bags” under someone’s eyes with the patch tool
• Enlarging breasts with the liquify filter

There is a wide variety of techniques covered in these videos, and the number of ways to post process an image in Photoshop is endless, but these should provide a decent introduction to basic photo retouching skills.

Quick Post Processing in Photoshop

Bruce from “That’s My Monkey” demonstrates quick and easy steps to improve images in Photoshop.  He takes a senior portrait of a girl named Liz, and in five simple steps, changes it from a flat image with little contrast, to a highly polished, vibrant image. The video uses a levels adjustment layer, contrast adjustment layer, changes the color balance to make the image warmer, increases the saturation slightly, and adds a dark vignette with the lasso tool and levels adjustment layer. These techniques are so simple and can do a wonderful job to improve a photograph.

Photoshop Post Processing: Lesson 2

In this video, you learn more in depth about the histogram, and how to modify it to make your images pop. This time, he uses an underexposed picture of his wife on the beach in a black bathing suit to demonstrate what an under-exposed picture looks like and then alters the photo’s white and black points (via a levels adjustment) to bring out its true colors.

Image Retouching – Part 1

This video is the first in a series of tutorials that shows image retouching techniques in Photoshop CS3 using the clone stamp and healing brush tools. He does an outstanding job of outlining a method to look at a photo and tell what should be retouched and enhanced. Among other things, he removes hot spots using the clone tool, and fixes skin texture. This is definitely a video to watch.

Photoshop Tutorial – Basic Retouch on a Glamour Image

This is a BASIC workflow retouch video for a beauty or glamour image. This is made for the beginner to intermediate level Photoshop user, and came from http://www.MandarichModels.com/Articles.html. After altering the histogram, the author uses the liquify tool to slim the model’s waist and alter her body slightly. She also demonstrates basic skin retouching (removing blemishes, fixing dark patches under eyes, etc), whitens teeth, adds highlights to her hair, and much more. It’s a great video, but gets out of synch towards the middle, which makes it a touch hard to follow, but it’s not too bad.

Professional Photo Retouching Tutorial

A member of Iceflowstudios.com takes a photograph of the gorgeous Ashley Tisdale, and turns it into a professional glamour image. From spot healing, to removing stray hairs, to changing highlights and shadows, to smoothing her skin with a surface blur, he shows quite a few techniques one can apply to photo retouching.

Breast Enhancement: Photoshop Retouching

How to enlarge breasts in Photoshop…no surgery required! In this tutorial, you learn a clever, natural-looking way to enhance a woman’s breast size in a photo. The actual enlargement is made with the liquify filter, and several tools within it (forward warp tool, reconstruct tool, and bloat tool). He really stresses small tips that help make the result more natural, and how to fix small artifacts that may make the enlargement appear odd.

There you have it, a few tutorials that will give you some ideas about how to post process your images in Photoshop. What does your image processing workflow look like?

You may also like:

1. 7 Photoshop Dodge & Burn Tool Video Tutorials
2. Selective Color Tutorials
3. Retouch Breasts in Photoshop
4. "Video Explosion" Hit of the Year: Latest "Digital Video Production Handbook" Offers a New Way of Learning How to Write, Shoot, Produce and Direct Digital Video
5. Andrei Doubrovski Updates Video-Book for Photoshop Users