Every photographer has heard this at least once. For those of us who've taken many fashion or glamour photos, we've heard it a lot.

Of course, every woman is beautiful in her own way, but our culture tends to value the smoothness and softness of the skin probably more than is truly healthy for a society. Even so, when photographing someone for their best effect, our goal is to capture the best image of reality possible, and then enhance it.

"Total time to retouch after launching Photoshop: six seconds."

Lighting, posing, makeup, hair and all the other physical aspects of photography come into play. But once you've got the image in your camera, a little digital lab work can make all the difference. That's where Photoshop (and the like) are really helpful.

Unfortunately, retouching facial features is more art than science and it's also more tedium than fun. Properly cleaning up a face could take hours of work and a degree of artistic skill that not everyone has. If only there was a better way.

Portraiture
Enter Portraiture, a $169 Photoshop plug-in from Imagenomic. Portraiture can help you get the most out of your portraits with the least amount of work. It's pretty slick.

Take, for example, Figure A.

FIGURE A

Here's the before and after pictures. Click picture for a larger image.

On the left is the woman's image as our clip art library provided us. On the right is the default retouching created by Portraiture.

As you can see, Portraiture removed the most of the freckles, smoothed out the skin, and left the rest of the texture intact. On the default settings, it did not touch her shirt, the quality of her tatoo, or the strands of her hair.

Total time to retouch after launching Photoshop: six seconds.

Of course, there's a bunch of settings you can fiddle with, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Like all good plug-ins, there's a lot you can adjust. Click picture for a larger image.

Like all good plug-ins, there's a lot you can adjust. Also, like all good plug-ins, you can save and recall your settings to create different styles.

In addition, you can use Photoshop actions to record retouching scripts and you can automate them using Photoshop's batch feature. So if you've just come back from a photo shoot with 745 images, you can put them in a folder, load them up, and have Portraiture run through and do a batch cleanup while you're at lunch.

Oopsie, it crashes
We really like Portraiture, but we'd be remiss in our duty to you, the reader, if we didn't report the one problem we had. It crashed. As you can see in Figure C, Portraiture caused Photoshop to crash.