Creative Retouching Essentials in a Day eBook

by Julia Kuzmenko McKim

This interactive eBook is for you if you are beginning your journey into the professional Beauty & Portrait photography retouching world. You don’t need to waste your time learning all the tools and panels Photoshop has to offer, if you only want to master or improve your photo retouching skills.

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Amazing Retouching Tips

Our eBook will help you to get a clear understanding as to what tools you need to be familiar with, and what to do with them to turn your photographs into works of art. In just three lessons you will know all the necessary panels, tools, functions and essential photography and retouching information to prepare you to dive into the advanced Beauty, Fashion & Portrait retouching techniques.

Moreover, you will learn how to fine-tune your Photoshop for peak performance, how to read and understand colors, what you need to know about color management, how to use custom brushes for Beauty and Portrait photography, what essential keyboard shortcuts you need to know, and a lot more. A few video tutorials will demonstrate the difference between Photoshop retouching tools, the trickiest Blending Modes and Adjustment Layers concepts, explain what’s so great about Layers and Layer Masks and more.

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How this eBook is Different

Most of the educational retouching programs (DVDs and eBooks) that are out there these days were created by professional retouchers, or famous photographers who teach their specific retouching style. I have watched many such DVDs that try to beat each other in the amount of hours of retouching they offer, and I fell asleep every time… just kidding, I didn’t. But honestly, although they are pretty expensive, I don’t think I’ve ever watched one of those programs from start to finish. Simply because I don’t need all those hours of retouching in real time and chit-chatting to fill it up. I am a busy professional and I want specific knowledge and skills, I don’t have 10 hours to watch a retouching DVD, trying to fish out a couple of things that I don’t already know.

Professional retouchers are getting paid for every of those 30-50 hours they spend on an image. If that’s what you want to do, than you definitely need one of (or all) those DVDs, because that’s what they teach. Hours and hours of retouching on 200-300% zoom. No doubt, they are masters of what they do, but they are pro retouchers. I am a pro photographer and retoucher, I work super fast, but I can still be proud of the images I deliver. I create my photos from start to finish, and I can tell you all about how to get to where I am at with my photography and retouching today, just follow my lead.

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Why this eBook is Short?

If you are a working photographer like me, than most likely you want to learn how to deliver excellent results very quick. There are always other important things for a pro photographer to get done such as promoting him- or herself to get more work, or actually making money shooting. More often than not, we professional photographers have retouching fees included into our photography service charges, so the quicker we get things done and submit to our clients, the better for us and our bottom line it is. No way I could afford to spend 30 hours retouching one image. I bet, you are the same way and that’s why you are here now.

I wanted to create an educational retouching program that is right on and brings to your attention ONLY what is essential to learn to be able to turn Beauty, Fashion, & Portrait images into works of art in post-production. And that is why the name of this eBook is “Creative Retouching Essentials In A Day”. It is well-structured and short enough (about 30 pages in total + a few short videos in the chapters that require visual demonstration) to allow you to absorb and digest everything you need to know before you move on to the advanced retouching for Beauty, Fashion & Portrait photography within one day.

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Why you Need this eBook

You don’t know what you don’t know. Even if you have been working in Photoshop for a couple of years you may still be lacking some knowledge that will lead you to that break through in your retouching. From my own teaching experience I know that a lot of photographers say: “Oh, I know all the essentials – I’ve been doing it for 2-3 years!” And when we get down to the advanced part of the course, I realize that they don’t know what Layer Masks are, never used the Free Transform tool or some of the Blending Modes, have no idea how to set target color in the Curves Adjustment layer or never heard of other essential things like that.

After reading this eBook you will have a clear understanding as to what tools you need to be familiar with, and if you are not yet, than you should practice working with them before you begin to learn Advanced retouching techniques. Essentials are super important, and any professional retoucher will tell you that. Check out our “From Amateur to Pro in a Week” eBook, when you know that you are ready to learn to become a Beauty retouching wizard.

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BONUS: Actions and Brushes

In the Bonus Goodie Bag you will find our Beauty Essential Actions ( + User Manual = $69 Value), a collection of Gradients and the Beauty Custom Brushes descriptions (URL for free download included). We also added a lot of useful information & materials in the “Getting Better Every Day” and “Photography & Photoshop” (Glossary included) PDF booklets. Please note that our Bonus materials will only work in Adobe Photoshop CS4-CS6.

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What Kind of Format is this eBook in?

Creative Retouching Essentials in a Day is a downloadable PDF file, which can be viewed on a number of devices – laptop and desktop computers, iPhone or Android devices, iPads, and other tablets.

For iPad specific users, our eBooks & Bonus Materials are compressed into ZIP files to decrease the size of the package for download. Use the link that you receive upon your purchase to download the ZIP file to your computer first, unzip it using any decompression program on your PC or MAC and then transfer PDF files to your iPad via iTunes or Dropbox app, whichever is more convenient for you.

Please remember that the Actions, Brushes and Gradients in the Bonus Goodie Bags of respective eBooks are a very valuable addition to the eBooks and you can only use them in Adobe Photoshop on your computer, so you need to download the ZIP file onto your computer anyway.

The Before & After images and videos in the eBooks will work on your computer and the reading material is also designed for viewing on the iPad, however the multimedia content in PDFs isn’t responsive on tablets – please use the links under the video thumbnails to watch them in the YouTube application on your iPad.