Better Portraits with Photoshop Plug-in

We can over look our shortcomings in the mirror with selective and creative vision. A camera has no such compunctions. When a photograph is taken what you see is what you get. In a studio, with a skilled photographer, miracles can take place. At a family outing, on vacation, or a casual snap over dinner in a restaurant doesn't have the same luxury.

People's skin is not perfect. It's full of pores, freckles, age spots, and blemishes. No wonder so many people hide when a camera comes out. In bad light with a harsh flash these epidermal problems become visually distracting in a photograph.

There is help, in the form of an Adobe Photoshop plug-in called Portraiture, developed by software firm Imagenomic. Fixing skin problems in digital images can be time consuming. If you're not a Photoshop guru your results can look like the attempts of a bad artist trying to replicate the Mona Lisa. With this plug-in skin problems are automatically corrected, leaving photographs anyone would be proud to hang on their walls.

The plug-in analyzes the image and fixes skin problems, while not destroying the fine detail in hair and eyebrows, a common problem when trying to soften an image. The super-intelligent software creates a skin tone mask, based on the tones in an image. This mask is used to create a smoothing effect across the full range of skins tones in a digital photograph, ensuring not only one area of the photo is corrected. There are preset levels that do automatic corrections. These presets can be fine-tuned to achieve your perfect image.

More advanced users can set brightness and contrast, warmth, and, softness and sharpness of an image, to achieve special effects. A number of "glamour" effects are preset, allowing you to change the look of an entire image.

The plug-in can also be used with Photoshop's batch processing feature. Do you have 50 photos that all need Portraiture's assistance? Set up a batch conversion and walk away, Photoshop and the plug-in will do the correction work so you don't have to manually correct all the images.

I have used this plug-in on many portraits. The results are amazing, making skin appear virtually problem free. I recommend that anyone interested in people photography give it a try. It is easy to use and the results are remarkable.

Portraiture is available for both Macs and PC, and run with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, 4, and 5. The software will support any image format supported by Photoshop. The plug-in won American Photo Magazine's Editor's Choice award for 2007.