Retouch4Me Heal and Dodge & Burn have become useful time-saving tools in my Photoshop portrait workflow. On the photographs I tested, they gave me natural-looking results with less manual retouching.
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How Retouch4Me fits into my portrait workflow
Dodging, burning and removing blemishes by hand can take a lot of time. I wanted to see how much of that work these plugins could handle, and whether I would still be happy with the results.
What is Retouch4Me?
Retouch4Me is a set of retouching tools, with separate plugins for jobs such as healing, dodge and burn, and skin tone adjustments. They can run as standalone apps or inside Photoshop.
For this review, I used Heal and Dodge & Burn.
Testing four portraits in different lighting
I used photographs from a weekend portrait event, taken with my Fujifilm X-S10. My usual workflow starts with colour and exposure adjustments in Lightroom, before I move into Photoshop for retouching.
Using the Heal plugin
Heal removes blemishes and other small distractions. I run it, adjust the intensity and check the result. If it removes something I want to keep, I can mask that area back in.
On most of the photographs I tested, I needed very little extra work. Retouching that would usually take me around 15-30 minutes with the spot healing brush, patch tool or clone stamp took under 30 seconds with the plugin.
Using Dodge & Burn
Dodge & Burn was the bigger surprise for me. In my tests, it processed the photograph in around 3-5 seconds and adjusted the light and dark areas of the skin without making it look overly smoothed.
I tried recreating the effect manually with grey layers and curves. That took me over 20 minutes, and I still preferred the plugin’s result on those portraits.
Those timings are from my own tests. Processing speed and the amount of finishing work vary with the image and computer, so I still check every result.
How the results held up
I tried the plugins on portraits taken in daylight, low light and golden hour. I was happy with the results across those different setups.
They’ve been useful when I want to finish portraits for social media without spending as long on each image. I’d still expect to do more detailed work for high-end commercial retouching.
Standalone or Photoshop?
I prefer the Photoshop integration because it fits into my existing workflow. The panel lets me run the plugins quickly and open their settings when I want more control.
You can see more of my portrait photography in my people portfolio.
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Final thoughts
Heal and Dodge & Burn have cut down the time I spend on manual retouching. I like that I can get a result I’m happy with quickly, then check it and make any extra adjustments in Photoshop.
For the portraits I tested, they fitted well into the way I already work.
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