If you believe in self-education (like I do), you don’t need to go to a school or college to become a retoucher, you should only know the right places where to find an information and spend many many hours, days and years for practice. I can help you with right resources where you can learn the High End retouching techniques. Hope it will save your time, energy and money (I wish I had these links couple years ago:-)
Most helpful and friendly community for retouchers is RetouchPro.
RetouchPro hosts a regular live, interactive masterclasses where you watch a guest retoucher’s desktop as they work in real time. You can also ask questions for the guest retoucher. These live events usually cost only $10 and for this money you will get a ton of useful information.
Free tutorials:
Free video tutorials:
Beauty retouching from Carrie Beene
Beauty retouching
from Natalia Taffarel
Photoshop spotlight from Calvin Hollywood
Bleach Bypass Look from Calvin Hollywood
The Double RAW Conversion Tutorial from Calvin Hollywood
Sean Armenta | Dodge & Burn Technique:
Sean Armenta | Anatomy of a Beauty Retouch:
Not Free Tutorials:
If it’s not enough 
there are DVD’s you can buy and learn High End retouching from professionals.
DVD Video Lessons:
- Introductory beauty retouching tutorial course teaching high end techniques & Photoshop tools. by NataliaTaffarel and Vitaly Druchinin
- Intermediate and advanced techniques on how to retouch beauty & hair images. by NataliaTaffarel and Vitaly Druchinin
- Mastering Retouching by Nick Saglimbeni
- Photoshop CS4 Beauty & Portrait Retouching Kit with David Cuerdon
- Rent video tutorials on YouTube from RetouchPro
The best retouchers around the world:
And finally, this is the list of the best successful retouchers with links to before and after portfolios:
- Amy Dresser
- Carrie Beene
- Steve Koshlap
- Toan Thai
- Natalia Taffarel and Vitaly Druchinin
- Calvin Hollywood
- Chris Tarantino
- Nick Saglimbeni
- Tzveta Stamatova
- Stéphanie (Alimage.com)
Retouching Companies:
If you know another useful retouching resources, please share with us, I promise to add links to this post if I find something helpful too.
Related posts:
[...] How and where learn High End Photo Retouching. Tips and resources. | Photo retouching in Photoshop. [...]
Wow! This stuff is brilliant! Thanks for the resources. I really enjoy retouching, although I’ve had to figure out things on my own. I think it’s fun. Here’s a bit of what I’ve done: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bebop-designer/sets/72157624808902394/
Thanks for sharing
[Reply]
Jon Reply:
October 12th, 2010 at 3:51 am
Bebop Designer those are some great photos would be great to see the original shot so see what you touch up. You need to fix the reflections on the glasses and the eyes don’t just add black to the image in those area most images wont have a true black in there. also do not use just the dodge tool to edit them out or blur them.