Portraiture smoothens everything including eyes/lips

Question

Level 1

22 points

Portraiture smoothens everything including eyes/lips

hi

I do portrait/fashion photography amongst other things and have recently tried out Portraiture v2 for skin smoothening. While its a quick & effective way to smoothen the skin of the model, I notice that it ends up softening/smoothening the eyes and lips too. Generally one woud tend to make the eyes/lids sharper, however on using Portraiture it renders them softer. How do other photographers deal with this? Does Portraiture allow a mask where one can remove smootheness from selective parts of the image? Or do most photographers use the skin smoothening tool in Aperture itself?

Would help to get different perspectives on this. Thanks in advance.

Bhaven

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1), Intel Core i7, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD

Posted on Mar 4, 2013 1:47 AM

Reply

Answer 1

hibhaven Author

Level 1

22 points

Mar 8, 2013 9:12 PM in response to hibhaven

Mmmm..not a single reply in 4 days!

Reply

Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

200,645 points

Mar 8, 2013 10:39 PM in response to hibhaven

Mmmm..not a single reply in 4 days!

Sorry, there do not seem to be many Portraiture users here. It is a quite expensiveadd-on, if you do not do many portrait photos. The trial I downloaded does not work with my current Aperture version.

Or do most photographers use the skin smoothening tool in Aperture itself?

I am using Aperture's skin smoothing brush, set to a moderate strength in combination with edge detection. That preserves the sharpness of the eye and mouth, but I add edge sharpening anyway. That is quite sufficient for the few portrait picures I am doing.

Reply

Answer 3

Mar 9, 2013 7:21 AM in response to hibhaven

Portraiture from Imagenomic is a complex, thorough, expensive plug-in. One of its features is (afaict -- I don't own it) _auto-masking_ faces: creating a mask of the skin areas that leaves out the eyes, mouth, and other areas to which one usually does not want skin-smoothing applied. If this feature -- or any others -- are not working for you, you are probably going to get a better answer by inquiring on the Imagenomic forums or asking them.

Here is a screen shot from Imagenomic's site showing the auto-mask preview:

Reply

Answer 4

hibhaven Author

Level 1

22 points

Mar 9, 2013 7:17 PM in response to Kirby Krieger

Thanks Kirby.

I visited the site of Imagenomic and realized they have various tutorials on their products including Portraiture. Their videos address my query. Thanks.

Reply

Answer 5

hibhaven Author

Level 1

22 points

Jun 26, 2013 12:03 AM in response to hibhaven

After doing some research and reading, I have learnt that Portraiture is smart enough to identify skin tones and hence applies smoothening only to skin tones and not to eyes or other facial features etc. For people of differing skin tones, viz, White, Brown, Black, Portraiture also allows the user to sample a skin tone using its sampling brush so that smoothening is applied to various types of skin tones and not limited to what the tool thinks is skin tone. And yes, as Kirby mentioned earlier, Portraiture provides a masking feature to track where the smoothening is being applied.

Reply