Erik Akers

I really had to think long and hard before I hit pub­lish on this post. I really, really did and it was because I didn’t know if I wanted to do try and keep this a secret all to myself and just never pub­licly acknowl­edge it’s exis­tence. But there are so many great resources out there that I use and relay on that in the end I didn’t think it was fare not to tell every­one about this.

So why did I want to keep this a secret? Because this plug in makes por­trait retouch­ing just way to easy. Well I take that back it doesn’t make por­trait retouch­ing easy, it makes what I think is the hard­est part of por­trait retouch­ing to easy and that’s skin smooth­ing. There are tons of ways out there to smooth skin but the tough­est part of any one of those tech­niques is main­tain­ing the tex­ture of the skin. With Por­trai­ture 2 this is now a non-issue cause it does all of that work for you.

If you’re a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher this thing is your dream, because you can batch process through it and the default set­tings and pre­sets are good enough that unless you just want to add more of your style to the pho­tos with just a few clicks of the mouse you can smooth the skin of hun­dreds of pho­tos, all why you go grab some lunch. And if you going doing a com­mer­cial shoot Por­trai­ture is pow­er­ful enough to really get the cus­tom look you may want.

After down­load­ing the trial, I decided to just grab a pic­ture and give it a try. The after pic­ture is on the left and before is on the right. Just look at the skin and the skin tones/smoothing. How long did it take to get those results? Two min­utes and about four clicks of the mouse. I was never sold so fast on a piece of soft­ware, never.

Now there are some lim­i­ta­tions,  and none of them are deal break­ers. Por­trai­ture does no retouch­ing, it may look like it does but it’s really just smooth­ing out the blem­ishes so they blend into the skin tones. In the above pic­ture I didn’t remove any blem­ishes before open­ing the pic­ture in Por­trai­ture and you can really till zoomed at 100% on the face. So you still need to retouch and remove any blem­ishes before open­ing the photo up in Por­trai­ture. Just do every­thing like you would before you get to skin smooth­ing, which should be toward the end of your work­flow, and when you get to smooth­ing skin let Por­trai­ture do the work for you.

There are Por­trai­ture plug-ins for Aper­ture, Light­room and Pho­to­shop and they are each sep­a­rate to buy. Don’t brother with the Aper­ture or Light­room ver­sions, go straight for the Pho­to­shop. This is just because only with the Pho­to­shop plu­gin, Por­trai­ture will put it’s out­put on a new layer that you can then blend with masks and opac­ity if you think the out­put is to much.

Here is a short Screen­cast of the skin smooth­ing of the photo above so you can see for your self how sim­ple and quick it is:

Link: Image­nomic Portraiture