How and where learn High End Photo Retouching. Tips and resources.

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:

Continue reading How and where learn High End Photo Retouching. Tips and resources.

Children Fashion Photography. Polar Bear knitting Jacket.









I have a triple FUN in collaboration with a talented children fashion designer Alla Koval.

  1. Absolutely awesome unique clothes. It is a pleasure just to hold it in hands:-)
  2. I very like a stage photography, creativity and unusual results with such type of photography.
  3. At the end we are getting gorgeous pictures of my kids, every mom wants to have  great photos of her children:-)

Lilia is an excellent model. Almost 3 years old toddler act seriously as a professional model:-) You can see her on a stage on the behind-the-scene video below.

As always, all technical aspects and full length video from this photo-session you can find on Alex Koloskov blog

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Before and after retouched images

Before and after retouched images

Continue reading Children Fashion Photography. Polar Bear knitting Jacket.

Post production of cosmetic brushes. Before and after retouching.




Recently we had a photo-shoot for Anisa International, Inc. a leading cosmetic brush design and manufacturing company based in Atlanta, GA.

Anisa Telwar is CEO & Founder of Anisa International. She is Creative entrepreneur who started a small distributorship in 1992 and built it into a successful cosmetic global enterprise. Opened a state-of-the art manufacturing facility in Tianjin, China in 2003. Read more about this talented inspirational woman and see the video interview at Women Are Saving The World Now blog.

It is always a big pleasure and source of inspiration to work with such passionate people like Anisa and the rest of her team.  Their products are well designed, have a great quality and true challenge for the photographer: exactly what we like:-).

The technical article on how we shoot these images can be found on our photographer’s blog: Shooting cosmetic brushes: simple tips to help dealing with chrome finish.
Basically, for the first photo we did the composition of  2 separate shoots: one with  and one without that horizontal handle with brushes. Such solution saved us some time on post-production, plus, gives one more benefit: a focus stacking. Read more how we did it.

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Products photography post production

Products photography post production

Continue reading Post production of cosmetic brushes. Before and after retouching.

Senior portraits post-production and retouching. Before and After.




Big kids of our friends asked us to shoot their Senior Pictures for Walton High School Yearbook. During the shoot Alex had a chance to test his DIY Vagabond II and I experiment with several post-production and retouching techniques.
For some of the images I used this tutorial: The Double RAW Conversion Tutorial from Calvin Hollywood. I really like the double RAW conversion method and use it often.

Here is the result:

Studio portraits

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Studio portrait photography, Atlanta, GA

Studio portrait photography, Atlanta, GA

Studio portrait photographer, Atlanta, GA

Studio portrait photographer, Atlanta, GA

Continue reading Senior portraits post-production and retouching. Before and After.

Architecture photography post-production for Vieler International.

Half year ago we did a product photo-session for Vieler International.

Now Andre Vieler asked us to shoot exterior photos of the whole plant. We used a fork lifter to raise the photographer to a height where was much less perspective distortion.  This works much better then any tilt/shift lens, I wish we could have such lifter for all of our architectural projects:-)

Here I’ll show you how I did a post-production, some parts of work flow. Here is the image before and after:

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Architecture photography post-production and retouching

Continue reading Architecture photography post-production and retouching for Vieler International.

First AKELstudio LIVE! masterclass went well. We did it!



It was not easy for Alex and me, because we are not a public people. But it was fun and gave us a great feeling that we did something useful:-) We are really enjoy every photo-session with water, because you never know exactly what will come up: every drop is unique:-) This is a very creative process with a lot of experiments.

As always, all technical aspects and full length video from the masterclass you can find on Alex Koloskov blog

Now I have some photos to share, including before and after post-production.

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Water splash photography masterclass

Water splash photography masterclass

Continue reading First AKELstudio LIVE! masterclass went well. We did it!

RetouchPRO LIVE webinar with Steve Koshlap

Yesterday I attended RetouchPRO LIVE webinar with Steve Koshlap. Steve is a professional jewelry and beauty retoucher. He demonstrated the diamond and jewelry retouch from start to finish using Photoshop. The information was really useful. Looking forward to see his other webinars.

Exactly in this time Alex was shooting a jewelry:-) And now I can use my new knowledge for this retouching. I’ll show you the result in couple months because now it is a confidential information.

Stay in touch!

Restaurant menu food photography.







Wing City2City Opening Soon. Wing City2City Take-Out Restaurant Will Provide The Best Chicken Wings In The Gainesville Ga.

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Food photographer, Atlanta GA

Food photographer, Atlanta GA

Continue reading Restaurant menu food photography.

Water in still life, product and advertisement photography: Episode two

Lighting setup, technical details, behind the scene video tutorial for these photos, as always available on our photographer’s blog article:
Water in product and advertisement photography: episode two released!
Today I’ll show you my retouching work. I really enjoyed working with such vivid bright colors. I am a color person, never liked black & white or sepia:-). This is why working with these colorful photos makes me truly happy and positive for entire day.

Hope you’ll feel this energy while looking at our images:-) Have a nice day!

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Sparkling water photography. Tutorial episod 2.

Sparkling water photography. Tutorial episod 2.

Continue reading Water in still life, product and advertisement photography: Episode two

Portrait retouching manual

It is not to easy to find lessons or tutorials how Pro prepare images of models for  magazines and advertising. I try to accumulate information what I  learn from different professional retouchers in this tutorial.

I do not pretend to “guru” status, you can correct me. I just want to learn how to do sublime retouching and post-production and share my knowledge with you.

This is an example of fast work-flow for a portrait retouching and post-production for print or web. If you like to learn this process in more details you can find a bonus links below.

Mouse Over to see Before and After

Portrait retouching and post-production lesson

Portrait retouching and post-production lesson

1 step. Clean Skin

Continue reading Portrait retouching manual and bonus links