Irene Rudnyk’s top 10 Photoshop tips and tricks for editing and retouching portraits

 

 

Portrait photographer and educator Irene Rudnyk has a lot of excellent photography and photo editing tutorials on her YouTube channel. In addition to her varied skillset, she has also dialed in an efficient and effective portrait-editing workflow. As part of her workflow, there are certain edits she performs to many photographs in Photoshop. In the video below, she highlights her top 10 Photoshop tips and tricks for editing portraits.

First up is her stretching technique. This technique allows you to change the aspect ratio of your image without cropping. Rudnyk uses this technique frequently when preparing images for Instagram or when trying to make her photos more symmetrical. You utilize the crop tool and move it just a little bit outside the frame of your photo and then use the marquee tool to select the background. You don’t want to stretch the model, but it’s okay to select and stretch the background, especially when you have a blurred background. Relatedly, you can use the stretching technique to make your model appear to have longer legs or to help counteract some lens distortion.

To learn more about how to utilize various stretching techniques and see all of Rudnyk’s top 10 Photoshop hacks for portraits, watch the full video below. You can see more videos from Rudnyk on YouTube and at KelbyOne.

(Via Irene Rudnyk)