Guide on How to Edit and Retouch a Portrait Headshot in Photoshop

Photo retouching and editing are carried out by expert professionals to highlight a photo and bring out its prime highlights. If you are a photo editing enthusiast and want to learn more about the headshot retouching techniques, stick with us until the end.

All kinds of photos, be it corporate images, individual portraits, magazine covers, or fashion photo shoots – any image that needs to be showcased in front of a wide range of target audiences to achieve the desired objective, require some sort of photo retouching or removing any imperfections.

Thankfully, Adobe Photoshop comes with numerous comprehensive tools, brushes, and filters that an image editor can leverage in their post-processing workflow.

Edits such as fixing bumps, specs, and blemishes, smoothing frizzy hairs, popping the color of the eyes, whitening the teeth, color grading, adjusting hue and saturation, fixing brightness and contrast, fine-tuning contours and highlights, etc.

Let’s look at the top eight practical techniques with step-by-step instructions for creating the best, most natural-looking headshot photos.

1. Rev up the subject’s eyes

   Eyes are the most prominent feature of a subject that onlookers notice first. Hence, the eyes should look perfect and strikingly bright without looking unnatural. Start by brightening the eye iris.

   1. Draw an ellipse over the subject’s eye iris.
   2. Boost the contrast and the color with the “Radial Filter”. This will give an added impact to the eyes.
   3. Select the “Camera Raw” filter and click the “Radial Filter” in the toolbar.
   4. Select the “Brush” tool and omit the outer parts.
   5. To make the iris appear darker, reduce the “Exposure” on the “Radial Filter” menu.
   6. For an added accentuation of the iris, you may darken the edges slightly; this will give the appearance of depth. Then remove the center of the circle with the “Brush” tool.

2. Eliminate the highlights or hotspots

   Too many highlights can make a headshot look unappealing, making the subject look sweaty and greasy. To fix this issue, use the “Patch” tool. This is one of the most useful tools for retouching headshot in Photoshop and is widely used by retouchers for removing unwanted hotspots.

   1. Roughly select the area surrounding the highlighting area.
   2. Drag the selected area towards a relatively clear part.
   3. Create a separate new layer and then adjust the “Patch” tool to “Content-Aware Fill” and click the “Sample All Layers” button on the right from the tool menu.
   4. Reduce the opacity slightly for a shiny illusion instead of a blinding highlight on the subject’s nose, chin, or forehead.

3. Removal of blemishes from the skin, making it flawless

   Photographers wish to make their photos look professional and appealing. However, sometimes the subject’s skin does not appear as flawless as it should be. Fret not. Photoshop has a quick and easy fix for this, frequency separation can be used for skin softening and make it free from any blemishes without making the image appear unreal.

   1. Erase any kind of spots, specs, blemishes, pimple marks, or other imperfections from the subject’s face, with the “Spot Healing” and “Clone Stamp” tools.
   2. Replicate this layer and then invert it. Bring the opacity level to 50% and then change the “Blend Mode” to “Linear Light”.
   3. On this layer, right-click and select “Convert” to “Smart Object”.
   4. Next, on the Filter tab section, click on “Other” while selecting the “High Pass” filter to sharpen the image. Set the blurry effect to 9 pixels.
   5. Next, click on “Filter” and select the “Gaussian Blur” from the “Blur” option. Set the value to 3 pixels (a third of the “High Pass Filter” value). This trick will bring back the natural texture to the image.
   6. Once the “Gaussian blur” effect is added, make sure to add a “Layer Mask” while clicking on the “Alt” button; this will hide the effect with a brush tool in white.
   7. Finally, reveal the skin with light paint strokes on the image.

4. Applying the “Dodge” and “Burn” tools

   The “Dodge” and “Burn” tools in Photoshop help professional photo editors fix extreme darkening and lightening issues on an image. The dodge tool brightens an unevenly darkened area, and the burn tool darkens an unnaturally lightened patch. In simple terms, these tools help to achieve a balanced image exposure, creating an ideal and realistic-looking skin texture.

   1. To make this edit on an image, press and hold the Alt key and create a new layer.
   2. Name this layer “Dodge and Burn” and set the mode to overlay.
   3. Check the box to fill the image with a greyish neutral shade and click on OK.
   4. With the “Brush” tool, paint black or white depending upon the areas you want to fix while setting the opacity level between 10%-20% from the “Options” bar.
   5. Press the X key and paint black below the cheekbones, near the jawline, neck, or any other darker places on the image. Apply white shade to the lighter areas of the face like the forehead, between the eyes, the chin, etc.
   6. Finally, go to the “” menu, select the “Gaussian Blur”, and apply the effect all over the image to smoothen the layer and blend all the brushstrokes. This will give a natural finish to the final result.

5. Sharpening the image by plumping up the skin

   One of the simplest, yet most crucial editing techniques in Photoshop image editors commonly use to achieve a fine headshot retouch. Before moving on to the process, let’s understand what “Color Channels” are in Photoshop.

   In Photoshop, an image contains a grid of multicolored pixels; these represent the color palette that can be further broken down into separate layers of color information, or “Color Channels”.

   Now, the sharpening process is mainly done through the red color channel as it contains minimal skin texture compared to the other channels. It is a tricky process since when the facial details are sharpened through the red channel, the surrounding skin still remains soft.

   1. Go to the “Channels” panel and select the “Red channel”. Then, select the “Unsharp Mask” from the “Filter” option. Based on the image resolution, the settings will vary. These settings are great parameters to try: As a pro tip, you may keep the “Amount” value at 100, the “Radius” at 3.0, and the “Threshold” value at 0.
   2. Select the “RGB” channel to check the image’s sharpness level.

6. Frizzy hair removal

   Fixing or removing the frizzy fly-away hairs can be easily done in Photoshop with the “Clone Stamp” and the “Spot Healing Brush” tools without blurring the borders. However, the process can be tedious and too technical at times, as one needs to be highly accurate and perfect while removing the hair strands from the edges of the forehead, nose area, and upper lips, which are the trickiest parts of the face. Let us break down the process for you in 4 quick steps.

   1. From the “Menu” bar on the left side, choose the “Clone Stamp” tool to cut off the hair strands from the base. Set the mode to “Normal”, and keep the “Opacity” and the “Flow” levels to 100%.
   2. Apply the “Spot Healing Brush” tool to paint the area to get a sample color.
   3. Again use the same tool to remove most of the hair strands.
   4. Zoom in to observe the image closely if you need to add or hide any excess or windblown hair strands.