Hi I do a lot of portraits I was wondering if there is a good plugin you would recommend for skin softening under lightroom 4 or any tips and techniques that you would recommend, I recently started switching over my processing with lightroom and still learning.
I'm far from an expert, especially when it pertains to retouching faces, but for skin softening, the best way to do it is with brushes. The most often recommended method to soften the skin in LR is to bring up the brush, set it to soften skin, paint over the areas you want to soften, and adjust the sliders to taste. Also pay attention to sharpening and masking sliders. If you're really into touching up faces, I would recommend looking into photoshop.
As far as plugins, I myself use Nik's dynamic skin smoothener in their Color Effex program. I find it works great as a one-touch solution (with default settings dialed down), but I can generally do a better job if I spend time working with brushes. However, I'm terrible and slow with brushes so I'm not always willing to spend the time. But give those brushes a try.
Thank you. I have the onOne software. Often when I edit in onOne and go back to Lightroom I don't see the adjustments made. I got imageiconic portraiture 2 seems to be pretty decent.
Yeah it seems like I had to import them again to the catalog. With portraiture once I click done it just puts the image that was worked on with the rest. Thank you for your feedback. Now if I could speed up Lightroom it would be great :-)
skasol... Did you get portraiture for lightroom or for photoshop? Are you able to batch process images with portraiture in lightroom? I am interested in getting it as I do most of my editing in LR and was hoping not to add another step and heading over to use it in photoshop. I have heard it is a fantastic program!
