I had an e-mail yesterday I thought was worth sharing here.

Here’s the question from the e-mail. “I just stumbled across this site when searching for Greeen screen info on Google and am very impressed with what you are doing here. Ok, I’ll get to the point. How did you retouch the senior you posted on August 31st? The skin is just so soft and perfect”

Here was my answer.

Hi Jack,

While most people think I spend lots of time retouching my images, the truth is I don’t. I have a very simple automated procedure that makes use of Photoshop actions that I have written as well as a Photoshop plug-in that smoothes out the skin and softens the skin.

If you are as busy as we are this time of year anything that will speed up your production and making your images look better and is very affordable is a no brainer. We have found that in a new Photoshop plug-in called Portraiture.

The really cool thing about the Portraiture plug-in is that it will automatically create a mask and only apply the skin smoothing and softening to the skin and not the background, eyes etc… The key to being able to automate this is the auto mask feature. In the past (before portraiture) we would run a skin softening action in Photoshop and since it applied it to the whole image we would have to go back and remove the effect from the areas that we didn’t want softened.

Since I shoot in Raw format in the studio, all images are color and density corrected in LightRoom. Therefore, when they get exported all that needs to happen is to have all the images automatically run through the workflow. The only thing I will do is go back and clean up any blemishes the filter did not get and whiten the eyes (that’s also an action). I also have an action for the Portraiture filter that set the filter to the settings I have determined that work best for me. I even have the filter add some warmth to all my images.

We have even automated this process through batch processing… I will cover that in more detail in a up coming video for our online training section of this site.

You can find the Portraiture plug-in and even download a free trail at:

http://www.imagenomic.com

Hope this helps,

Mike

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 5:42 am and is filed under StudioStyles.net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.