Photo Retouching

Color Grading

What Color Lookup Tables Actually Do (And Why Your Skin Tones Keep Breaking)

Last spring I was helping an e-commerce client audit their retouching pipeline. They had a freelancer applying the same “cinematic” LUT to every product image, flat lay to lifestyle shot to white-background apparel. The LUT looked great on the moody denim campaign it was built for. On a white t-shirt? It was pulling the highlights into a greenish gray and turning every skin tone the color of old mustard. Nobody had caught it because the freelancer was working fast and the art director was approving on a phone screen.

August 10, 2026

Video Tutorials

Remove Distractions in Photoshop in Minutes: Aaron Nace's Game-Changing Generative Fill Workflow

E-commerce clients don’t care about scaffolding. They don’t care about the stray tripod leg that crept into the corner of your shot, or the shadow a light stand threw across an otherwise clean background. They care about the product, the model, the scene. Everything else is noise, and removing that noise used to eat serious time. I’ve had jobs where cleanup work accounted for nearly a third of my total post-production hours.

March 12, 2026