In this tutorial Kelly Robitaille unveils her entire creative workflow for taking surreal and whimsical portraits from concept to realization. Beginning with a concept, Kelly stresses the importance of giving her subjects backstory to create a narrative and enhance character-driven emotion within her images. She then dives into the technical side of her work demonstrating a number of Photoshop tools in interesting and unconventional ways specific to her style, yet easily translated into nearly any style or genre. Using common Photoshop practices like dodge and burn, frequency separation, compositing, blend modes, the liquify tool, and puppet warp, Kelly’s workflow provides a fresh look at retouching as an artful practice more than a trite and repetitive process. Kelly teaches how to manipulate human form with purpose, invoke emotion with characters, and use textures to create depth and atmosphere within images. Finally Kelly challenges you with a homework assignment, providing a RAW image and character story to create an image of your own.

We have teamed together with some of the world’s best instructors to create the most comprehensive photography tutorials available on the Internet today. We shoot everything on-location in a documentary style to give you the sense of being on-set with our instructors and their teams. Our goal is for you to learn through example by watching the instructor’s entire workflow and listening to the thought process that goes into creating professional images. It's our mission to cut out the frustration and guesswork from your workflow by offering you a solid foundation that concentrates on the WHY and not just HOW things are done. Nothing is scripted, nothing is rehearsed, but everything is planned. When you start one of our tutorials you are going on an immersive learning experience that is exclusive to RGG EDU.