Skin Softening, The way I Do It.

Welcome to my blog.  Today I offer you a video tutorial on skin softening.  No matter how beautiful your model, you are going to have to do some retouching in post - especially if you want your models to look their best.  With todays cameras that can record 20, 30, heck 80 megapixels of data, you are going to see every flaw when you look at it up close.  This is why you will need to retouch.  I am not saying that you need to Photoshop every single image, but if you plan to blow an image up really big and people will be able to view the image up close, I think you owe it to your yourself and your model to retouch the skin.  If you look at magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair you can see sometimes there is too much Photoshop going on.  I am against that plastic baby doll face look.  I like to see texture in the skin, however, I do want it to be smooth.

There are many ways to retouch skin and I have tried most, if not, all of them.  To soften skin, all you’re basically doing is applying a blur to the skin, the trick is to use the right amount of blur to specific areas.  This blur cannot be a consistent amount applied to the whole face.  The blur has to be more dense in certain areas and less dense in others.  Think of it as thick and thin application of blur.  You can do this with a mouse, and the brush tool varying the amount as you go, but it will take you a very long time to get it just right.

So lets skip past all the trial and error methods of skin softening and move right into the heart of the matter.  If you haven’t heard of a company called Imagenomic, you are really missing out.  Imagenomic makes plugins, specifically plugins that do a great job at controlling blur.  They are famous for a noise reduction plugin called Noiseware.  Yes noise is dealt with by blurring it, but that is a different story.  In the case of retouching a face the have developed an invaluable plugin called Portraiture.  The latest version called Portraiture 2 is at the top of the game in a retouchers tool box.  I use it simply because it works the best and best of all, it’s simple to use.  I am no expert on the use of the plugin, but I can achieve the results I am looking for with a few simple steps.

Below is a video showing my workflow from Lightroom to Photoshop and back. While in Photoshop I retouch a face with the Portraiture plugin.

Please remember this video is not intended to be definitive I am not claiming this video is the ONLY way or even the BEST way to understand skin softening. I am merely offering my thoughts on skin softening and offer this video only because it might be helpful to someone. Thanks for taking time to visit my blog, I hope you have a great day. Thomas Shue