Finding the perfect finish to your photos through retouching very often requires an artistic touch. Although the process generally consists of masking, layers, frequency separations, and blur filters, there will be times that you will also need to hand-paint missing details back into the image. Here I will walk you through my workflow for photo retouching and hopefully give you some useful tips along the way.

The first step is to start with a great image. Like any other post-production process like mixing a song, or editing a film, you are only looking to add an extra polish or sparkle to the material you are working with. The greatest mix on a bad song is still a bad song. So focus on images that already have that bit of magic with your goal being to just coax a little more of that magic out.

My typical workflow is to make a first pass of general corrections to the image with the healing or spot healing tool before doing frequency separations. When I have a nice clean, realistic-looking image with a strong skin tone, I am ready to move on to the next phase. Keep in mind that you may not necessarily want to remove every single blemish or birthmark from the image because a lot of times it is the little incongruities that gives the subject their own identity and character. Let the parameters of the project be your guide along with the final effect you wish to accomplish.

Next I will generally tackle hair. For this image I replaced the background by masking her out of the image and creating a red gradient layer behind her. I did this so that I could mask out errant strands of hair instead of using the spot healing brush, for example, because although the healing brush delivers great results, I can't predict the exact results it will give me every time I use it. By creating my own background, which was simple enough to do in this case, when I mask out her hair to reveal the background underneath, I know exactly what I'm going to get.

Because she has such an elegant look in this photograph, I wanted to make sure that her hair was immaculately styled as well. I removed all the errant strands of hair I could find and to avoid "helmet-hair" I used a brush to draw back in strands of hair in places to give it a more organic feel.

Now it's time for frequency separations.

Frequency separations is a process that all advanced photo-retouchers will use where you will split your image into two layers, dividing them into a "low" and "high" frequency. This technique gives you the ability to preserve the skin's texture while blurring out any imperfections underneath, which gives a great look of realism to the final result. There are a bevy of articles on photo separation out there. I trust in you to research the method on your own, but let me show you some of the results you can achieve.

In the above image, I have applied frequency separation, but I have pulled back the effect to 15% opacity. The amount of correction is up to you and again should be dictated by the final result you are looking for. Heavy frequency separation can often create a "plastic" or "doll-like" result, that many people feel contribute to unrealistic expectations of beauty. However, heavy separation also can create a "stylized" look that some people are used to and even expect when it comes to certain publications or styles.

The following image shows the frequency separation I did for this image at 100%.

One thing to keep in mind, because frequency separations allow you to preserve the skin texture, when you are trying to correct blemishes, skin tone and color issues, work on the low frequency layer. But if you want to deal with things like wrinkles and lines, that will be a part of the skin texture so you will have to adjust the high frequency layer. And having the skin texture isolated gives you the ability to create many other effects such as horror effects, apply tattoos, and even add/remove make up.

After settling on 62% for my frequency separations, I highlighted her eyes by using a curve adjustment and masks on her irises to lift the brightness, and then I added a little "bling" to her necklace by duplicating the layer, crushing the values with a level adjustment until only the highlights were left. To black out the other parts of the image other than her necklace and earring, just use a black brush and paint it out on the layer until only her jewelry is left. Place this image above the other layers, give it a directional blur,  and then set the layer mode to Color Dodge. Color Dodge will give it this sort of chromatic aberration effect. Give it some color grading with a curves adjustment (here I just added some more blue to the shadows to counterpoint her eyes) and you're done!