Retouching

Brushes & Tools

How to Build Custom Photoshop Brushes That Actually Work Inside Actions

Every time I open a client’s Photoshop file and find a dozen unnamed brushes with opacity set to 37% and hardness at some arbitrary middle value, I feel it in my chest. Not judgment, exactly. More like recognition. That was me, fifteen years ago, before I understood that a brush isn’t just a painting tool. Inside an automated workflow, it’s a variable. And variables you don’t control will eventually wreck a batch run at the worst possible time.

June 3, 2026

Video Tutorials

Photoshop's Updated Remove Tool Is the Closest Thing to Magic I've Added to My Workflow

Last month I was working through a product shoot for a Chicago-based furniture client. Clean studio setup, nice light, solid images. But every single frame had the same problem: a small utility hook on the back wall that the art director had missed during the shoot. Forty-seven images. A hook that sat right at the edge of a gradient background, with just enough tonal variation around it to make the Healing Brush throw fits.

May 31, 2026

Actions

Building a Skin Smoothing Action That Looks Natural

Most skin smoothing actions produce results that look obviously retouched — waxy, pore-free skin that belongs in a video game, not a photograph. Building a natural-looking skin smoothing action requires understanding what makes skin look like skin, and carefully preserving those qualities while reducing what you don’t want. What Natural Skin Looks Like Real skin has texture at multiple scales. There are large-scale features (bone structure, muscle contour), medium-scale features (pores, fine lines), and small-scale features (micro-texture that gives skin its matte quality).

March 16, 2026

Brushes

How to Create Custom Brush Presets for Retouching

Photoshop’s default brushes are general purpose. They work, but they’re not optimized for the specific demands of portrait retouching. Building custom brush presets tuned for skin work, dodge and burn, and detail editing makes a measurable difference in both speed and quality. Here’s how to create the three brushes every retoucher needs. Brush 1: The Skin Smoother This brush is designed for painting on masks over skin areas — typically for frequency separation smoothing layers or noise reduction layers.

February 5, 2026