Retouching goes wrong in a predictable way. The blemishes disappear, the skin turns to plastic, the eyes get whitened past belief, and at full print resolution the whole face reads as a mask. This course teaches the opposite approach: work that survives a 100 per cent zoom because texture was never destroyed in the first place.
The day starts with reading the image. Before any tool is picked up you learn to decide what to fix, what to leave and what belongs in the raw processing stage rather than the retouch. You then build a proper retouching stack: cleanup on its own layer, frequency separation for tone and texture, dodge and burn on a neutral grey layer for shaping, and grading on top. Each stage stays separate, so a client asking for less can be given less without starting again.
The second half moves to compositing. You cut a subject out using channels and Select and Mask, then do the work that actually sells the result: matching light direction and colour, adding grain so the two sources share the same noise, treating the edge so it does not glow, and painting shadows that put the subject on the ground. You finish with sharpening for a named output, a client-ready export and a layered file tidy enough to hand to someone else.
This is a practical day with two full projects: a portrait taken through to a finished, believable retouch, and a subject composited into a new scene. Both files are yours to keep, along with the class recording for twelve months. It runs live online or in the classroom in Colombo, with pricing in LKR for Sri Lanka and USD internationally.
The class assumes real fluency in Photoshop. If channels, curves and smart objects are not yet second nature, take Photoshop Level 2 first.
