There are many different tools out there that help photographers edit.  We all use Photoshop or Lightroom, actions or our own mix of things to come up with our workflow.  And most of us that photograph seniors use some type of skin softening action or plugin.  One of the most common tools for skin softening is Portraiture by Imagenomic.  Portraiture not only softens skin but does it in a fast and effective way!

Using Portraiture may seem a little scary at first!  I didn’t really even understand how it worked with Photoshop for a long time.  But it really is quite simple and very fast to use!

Portraiture is considered a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom.  A Plugin is are add-on programs aimed at providing additional image effects or performing tasks that are impossible or hard to fulfill using Adobe Photoshop alone. Plugins can be opened from within Photoshop and several other image editing programs. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoshop_plugin)

Once Portraiture is downloaded, you will find it in Photoshop under the Filter menu.  Below is a screen shot of where Portraiture is located within Photoshop.

The simple way to use Portraiture is to run it in automatic mode.  This does an excellent job in softening the skin and it does it very quickly.  Unlike some of the actions out there that you have to paint on, Portraiture allows you to click run and you are done.

According to Imagenomic, maker of Portraiture, this tool has an auto-mask feature that makes it easy to quickly discover the skin tone range and make adjustments.  I tried this auto feature and it worked brilliantly!  I was very happy with the results!

If you want to add your own manual adjustments, you can.  It really all depends on your level of expertise and how much skin retouching you wish to do.  As with everything, it is all about preference.  You can do a ton of retouching or a little.  You can go heavy on the skin softening or light.  Just like with editing, you need to find your own style and trust what you think is best as the photographer.

Similar to Lightroom, Portraiture comes with its own set of presets that provide unique results.  The presets are Default, Smoothing Normal, Smoothing Medium, Smoothing High, Enhance Glamour, Enhance Tones, Enhance High Key and Enhance Low Key.  Each of these provide automatic results which vary in intensity and effect.  However, the beauty of this tool is that you can customize the settings to your preference using the slider tools.  So if you want to use the Smoothing Normal but want to change it a little, you can use the sliders to intensify or lessen the effect in certain areas.

Playing around with the different sliders and determining your preferences will be the key to utilizing this tool for your workflow.  Don’t be afraid to try things out as you can always click the undo button.  I found it useful to use the side by side preview setting so that I could see the before and after as I played around with the settings.

In addition to running Portraiture on an individual image, you also have the ability to utilize batch processing.  This will allow you to run Portraiture on multiple images, which will help you get through your workflow super fast!

There are many, many great video tutorials on Imagenomic that will help you learn the basics of this amazing program.  I think you will find it very useful in editing your senior portraits.  You can download a trial version of this program via their website and I highly recommend doing that to test it out and figure out for yourself the benefits of this awesome plugin!

Check out the before and after photos below to see the effects of Portraiture and how great they are for senior portrait photography.