Photography (Slightly Beyond) Basics – My Most Used Photoshop Plugins – Plugins for Portraits

by Mickey Rountree

In this article, I’ll show you a couple of the plugins I use for retouching skin in portraits, female portraits in particular. Two of the most widely used plugins for portrait retouching are Imagenomic Portraiture, and Anthropics PortraitPro. Both have their advantages, and both can give you good results. Both are available at their websites below.

https://imagenomic.com/Products/Portraiture

https://www.anthropics.com/portraitpro/

When these articles are converted to PDF and sized for the newsletter, the resolution and quality of the images is seriously degraded. If you would like to read the article and see the images as I did, you can see this article on my website at this link.

https://mickeyrountree.smugmug.com/Articles/Basic-Photography-Series/

My most used retouching plugin is Imagenomic Portraiture. This one is fairly expensive, in the $250 range. I’m still using version 2, and although version 4 is out with a lot of improvements, I’m used to version 2 and most importantly happy with my results.

Portraiture can be set to output to a new layer which I always select, so I can vary the opacity and apply masking if necessary. There are several presets, or you can adjust settings with the sliders and save your own presets. I have several presets I have created for various situations. At the heart of the interface is the eyedropper tool which you use to select the various skin tones that you want to modify. With skin tones selected apply a preset or adjust the sliders for the amount of retouching you want.

Anthropics PortraitPro is another popular program, which does much more than just skin softening. It can sculpt faces, add makeup, lengthen neck and several other tasks. I don’t use it often, but it is much cheaper, at around $90. I’m still using version 15, and the current version is 23. I would upgrade, except that I don’t use this plugin often.

This plugin does not offer the option of saving to a new layer, so I always first create a copy layer and then run the plugin so I can adjust opacity and masking. When you first open the plugin it will attempt to recognize the face and place markers over key features. There are points you can drag to refine the selection. In the right hand column are all of the adjustments available, and each one opens further into individual adjustments. Again there are presets, and you can save your own.

I thought the best way to compare these two programs would be to work on the same image. We’ll start with this unretouched image, and see how the programs do with no other retouching. This is actually pretty unrealistic, since normally I would remove larges blemishes first, but let’s see what happens. Our goal is a nice complexion, free of major blemishes and blotchy skin. At the same time, we don’t want to go overboard, and create skin that looks totally plastic with no texture.

Without retouching the blemishes, here are the results with Imagenomic Portraiture and one of my saved presets. It’s much improved, although the larger blemishes are still obvious.

Again without retouching the blemishes, here are the results with PortraitPro and its default female preset. It’s much improved, although the larger blemishes are still there they are slightly less obvious.

Now for a more realistic test, I’m going to remove the major blemishes. In the past I would have used the spot healing and healing brushes, but since its introduction I’m finding the remove tool does a great job. Below is the remove tool and the results of just removing blemishes. Notice that while the large blemishes are gone, the skin is still rough and blotchy.

Here is the result of using Portraiture after blemish removal.

And here is the result of using PortraitPro after blemish removal.

Both did a good job, although I prefer the Portraiture version. That may be because I use it more frequently and so I’m more skilled with it. Either would be perfectly acceptable.

There is a more specialized skin retouching known as frequency separation. This technique creates a high frequency layer with the skin detail and a low frequency layer with skin color. I use Portraiture for my somewhat corrupted version of the technique by applying one of my presets to the color layer, and then dialing down the opacity until it looks good to me. Here is the image I’ll use to show the results frequency separation. This is the image with only Lightroom editing and no retouching.

Here is the image after using the remove tool to get rid of the major blemishes.

Below are the layers that make up frequency separation. The layer labeled low frequency copy is the layer with my Portraiture preset. I usually adjust the opacity down to 80 to 85%, and then flatten the image.

And here is the final result of the frequency separation technique. Notice how the skin tones are smoothed out, but there is still real skin texture, so we don’t get that plastic Barbie Doll look.

While we’re discussing skin smoothing, if you don’t do a lot of portraits and only need to retouch skin occasionally, the current version of Photoshop (24.7 as of this writing) has a neural filter which uses AI to find the face in a portrait and apply skin softening that is very much like frequency separation. It is under filters/neural filters and it is skin softening. If there is a cloud image next to it, you may have to download it to your computer before you can use it. The blur slider adjusts the detail in the skin while smoothness adjusts the blending of skin tones to remove blotchiness. The biggest downside is that the filter looks for a face and makes a selection box that can’t be adjusted. Notice in this case that leaves the skin of the lower shoulder and arm unselected, and if you look closely, you’ll see the difference in the final image. For tight headshots this works very well, but not so well when there is other skin in the image.

This is the final result with the neural filter skin softening.

Photography (Slightly Beyond) Basics – My Most Used Photoshop Plugins – Plugins for Portraits

Related Posts

Photography Basics – Air Show Photography

Photography Basics – Removing Dust Spots

Photography Basics – Removing Reflections