Creative Editing: 24 Stunning Photoshop Edits For Portraits

This week’s highlights reel of images from our CLG community comes courtesy of our Discovering Photoshop Creative Workshop which recently wrapped up. Over the course of the four week tutorial, our students experimented with different types of photo edits, which resulted in some absolutely STUNNING Photoshop fixes both for portraits and landscape photography! This article is just a tiny sample of the amazing art results they created using the techniques we covered in the workshop…

Clean Photo Edits

We began the workshop by looking at workflow basics and how to use Photoshop edits to enhance and strengthen our straight out of camera images. From adding contrast and boosting portrait saturation, to sharpening and noise reduction, developing your own basic workflow will speed up your editing and help you achieve consistency across your whole photo portfolio.

Related: 18 Creative Photos Using Twinkle Lights

Adding Magic With Overlays

Right from the very beginning of the workshop, our grads were OBSESSED with overlays, and it’s easy to see why! These types of photo edits can be used to add everything from light, texture, or bokeh, to snow, glitter… The possibilities really are endless!

Related: Low Light Photography: 18 Gorgeous Photos Using Pockets of Light

Spectacular Skies Photo Retouching

Blown the sky while exposing for your subject? No problem! Just switch out the sky! And if you’re running Photoshop 2021, the new Sky Replacement tool means it only takes a couple of clicks to replace your flat, boring in-camera sky with a striking sunset or a host of puffy white clouds…

Related: 21 Creative Images Using Selective Focus

Head Swaps and Composites

Related: 24 Unexpected Creative Photos to Make You Smile

Cloning and Creative Cropped Pictures

As well as being a powerful program for creative editing or portrait retouching, Photoshop is also a useful tool for tidying up clutter in an image, either by cropping it out, or by using the clone and heal tools to spirit it away. For example, in this next image, Ebru cloned out her hubby in the background to create an even stronger sense of scale.

Related: 10 Spectacular Negative Space Photos

Embracing the Light

In addition to the photoshop edits for portraits discussed, one of the other techniques we covered in the workshop was how to use light overlays. This photo retouching experience was meant to enhance the gorgeous light we’ve captured in our straight-out-of-camera images, paying attention to the placement, direction and temperature of the light to ensure it looks natural. Our grads absolutely nailed it!

Related: Three Secrets to Beautiful Backlit Photos

Adjust White Balance

Among the most effective photoshop edits you should know about if you want to become a skilled photographer, learning how to adjust white balance can help you add a polished look to all your portraits.While generally the camera reproduces colours the same way they look in real life, white balance influences how warm or how cool the colors look in your photographs.

Auto white balance can give bad color effects to your photos leading to dull skin tones or hair colour, either because it sees different colors from your subjects, or because it can’t see the color from your flash. To adjust white balance you can either use your camera in manual mode, or adjust the colors in Photoshop.

We hope you enjoyed this collection of portraits and composites from our Discovering Photoshop edits workshop for students! If it’s inspired you to give Photoshop a go, check out our How to Use Photoshop Overlays video to learn how to add your own Photoshop overlays!

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