What program do you guys use out there for skin retouching? Such as skin smoothing, blemish removal and so forth. I was thinking about "portrait professional max 6", any other suggestions?
I'm not a plug-in maven, but I've found Portraiture to be astounding. One thing it seems to do is to sample the "normal" skin texture and replicate it after smoothing irregularities. It's auto-masking feature is also a great timesaver (although I still manually clean up the eyes and lips).
I have several programs (see profile), but for your best results you can learn how to retouch photos yourself. Over on lynda.com there are two retouching classes taught by Chris Orwig. If you invest 10 or 20 hours in these classes, you will be able to get results that are much better than the plugins.
I agree with Imagenomic Portraiture. The autosampler works great as far as only smoothing tonal ranges specified by you. One suggestion - if you plan to convert to B&W apply the plug in first as color gives you better tonal gradations to mask the skin.
If a single purpose plug in isn't practical for you, take a look at Nik Color Efx 3. It has dymaic skin smoothering as part of the package. Works pretty good, but less control than Imagenomic.
I just completed Scott Kelby's 2 part Professional Portrait Retouching course on kelbytraining.com. The course is very good. Everything is done in Photoshop, so you can follow exactly what is happening and correct any mistakes. He covers eyes, lips, skin, clothing, etc. About 4 hours total in length, but well worth the investment of time.
DanBrown wrote:
I just completed Scott Kelby's 2 part Professional Portrait Retouching course on kelbytraining.com. The course is very good. Everything is done in Photoshop, so you can follow exactly what is happening and correct any mistakes. He covers eyes, lips, skin, clothing, etc. About 4 hours total in length, but well worth the investment of time.
I was going to go with Portraiture by Imagenomix, but for $18 a month you can try Scott Kelby's techniques. Sign up for one month, and you can get all kinds of tutorials besides skin softening. After 1 month cancel if you don't like it, and then try something else.
Some comparison examples of Portraiture on a sample of very rough skin. In thise cases, Portraiture is used at high level "straight."
This is an example of an extremely troublesome skin type that is impossible to smooth acceptably by any kind of Guassian blur technique. I had previously achieved acceptable results using the Photoshop Healing tool and the Dust and Scratches filter, but Portraiture certainly provides an additional option that is certainly worthwhile--especially because it's very fast and requires virtually no extra work.
Even if I use it in combination with Dust and Scratches, the auto-mask feature of Portraiture makes even that task much easier and faster.
