Advanced Retouching techniques

If you search online for images using the word 'retouching' you'll find thousands of images—mostly of women. This illustrates a misogynistic view on how women should appear in public - you'll find a good few images of men too, also made and retouched to the point that they appear like plastic dolls with no blemishes and no character to boast of.

But retouching is not just about correcting the human form's shortcomings, however misguided that concept might be. It's also about performing simple tasks like removing bits of litter from a landscape that you'd not noticed when the shot was snapped, it's about correcting seriously warped perspective created when shooting with a wide-angle lens, it's about re-presenting an image to create a different look. To fully retouch any image, you can use one or, more often, a range of retouching and manipulation tools, principally: the Clone and Healing Brush Tool...