Curious. Has anyone tried the Portraiture plug-in or the Real Grain plug in? The Portraiture plug-in claims to do a fantastic job on skin so you don't have to. Sounds a little too good to be true...

I've only tried the trial for Portraiture; it puts a grid over the image if you haven't paid for it, but you can get a hint of how well it works thru the gridwork. Here's a StockXchng image -- before and after -- this was just using it on automatic -- probably too much smoothing of skin irregularities? It does allow some control over the strength of the effect, and it offers a number of choices -- Normal, Medium or High Smoothing and Enhancement settings of Glamour (see image below next to "before/after"), Tones, High Key and Low Key.

Here's one thread at DPreview discussing the Portrait plugin, and some of the posters actually have the working software -- I haven't read it all yet, but one good retoucher on the forum agreed that it is a time saver and has a good masking function.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=21446903

I recently evaluated most of the grain plugins on the market, as well the shake-and-bake do it your self grain recipes floating around out there. RealGrain was *by far* the best of the lot. I was using AlienSkin's grain plugin for a while during the trial and thought it "not too bad" until I installed real grain... huge difference.

The key issue for me was that most grain effects end up looking like an overlay of noise rather than true film grain. Real Grain simulates this much better. At home now and don't have it installed on my MBP, otherwise would post a sample. Maybe tomorrow ;)

I've got screenshots and examples of Imagenomic products on my website (URL in sig). Go to the Developers page and look under Imagenomic's logo for the links.

You can see a larger example from Portraiture in my free 2007 PDF calendar (http://www.plugsandpixels.com/pdf/2007calendar.pdf) (June page).

I run the Portraiture plug-in before trying anything else, also use their Noiseware plugin a lot, they are very similar...Portraitue has a lighter touch even when set high..both plugins are fantastic. It treats the photo with kitten gloves.. If you have a picture you want me to run thru it.. I can test it for you..I'll use the default settings and post the results...good bad or indifferent.

Sometimes the results stand alone (fantastic) if not, it gives me a solid place to start..cutting my work, big time.

Lasa

(The sample below is default setting)

Is that before/after strictly Portraiture, or did you do other things as well? It looks pretty damn good to me. I'd like to see it work on a more blotchy complexion with the dark bags under eyes, etc, but can't find a good photo right now.

Thanks for the example though. I might have to try this plug in.

I did nothing to it...ran the default setting..period.
I really like the software.
Lasa

can it work with psps x or Photoshop 6.0