The irony of staring at an image forever is that it can actually become easier to start to miss things — a sort of photographic tunnel vision, if you will. This simple trick makes it easy to see every blemish on a subject, ensuring you won’t miss anything in your retouching and making your work more efficient.

Coming to you from Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect, this helpful video teaches a technique that takes advantage of a very straightforward characteristic of blemishes and leverages it to make them more visible to the photographer when retouching an image. Blemishes typically are small inflammations and thus, contain more red than the skin around them. As such, if we create a black and white version of the image and pull all the red out of it, this should make the blemishes appear particularly dark compared to the surrounding skin, making it easy to immediately pick them out and retouch them, which is the exact trick Dinda demonstrates above. One quick tip: be careful when using the Patch Tool trick to heal multiple blemishes simultaneously; make sure you’re able to keep track of all of them at the same time in case something goes amiss.