I will continue to choose Portraiture for my family, maternity, and headshot images, though. This is worth the extra time it takes for me to brush it on the skin. I love the look that the De-Blotch action gives to newborn skin and appreciate that it also evens out the skin tone and tones down the highlights for me. It is half the price, and comes with other actions to enhance eyes, make hair look shinier, whiten teeth, and more. If I had to choose between Portraiture and Pro Retouch, I would choose Pro Retouch. Here’s a video of me editing newborn skin with Photoshop’s neural filter for skin smoothing.Īs you can see in these examples, the three methods of skin smoothing I compared all produce similar results! I am disappointed that the skin smoothing neural filter in Photoshop will only smooth the skin on the face, but in general I love the concept and I am hopeful that Adobe will continue to roll out new neural filters and improve upon the ones now available. There are only two sliders to adjust so it’s simple to use, but not as customizable as Portraiture. Like Portraiture, it creates its own mask, so you do not have to brush it on manually which saves a lot of time. It runs on one face at a time, so I can see it being helpful for family or wedding photographers who might want to run it at different strengths on each person in an image. This filter would only work if you only photograph babies swaddled or wearing long-sleeved clothing. I prefer to smooth the skin on the face and the body of newborns. Since I photograph naked babies a lot, this is not going to work for most of my newborn portraits. One big drawback for using Photoshop’s neural filters for newborn photography is that the skin smoothing filter only affects the face. I wanted to see if this free option was as good as the other two methods that I have used for years. The skin smoothing filter needs to be downloaded but is free for Photoshop CC users, which is a huge plus! This is what motivated me to compare these three skin smoothing methods. The neural filters are a newer feature of Photoshop CC, released in October 2020. In this video, you can see how Portraiture works to smooth newborn skin. For me, it was well worth the price since I have used it for years on thousands of images. It is $199, which is not too bad if you are a working professional photographer, but more prohibitive if you are a hobbyist or on a tight budget. The biggest drawback is probably the price. You can let it do this automatically or you can fine tune the mask yourself by using the eyedropper tool and selecting the skin tones on your image. The smoothing is automatically applied only to the skin and does not affect details like eyes and hair. The best thing about Portraiture is that it finds the skin tones in your image and creates its own mask. I typically choose the “normal” preset and then tweak it to my liking. It comes with several presets that you can choose from, depending on the amount of smoothing you want on your image. You can also purchase it for Lightroom, but I have only used it in Photoshop so I can not comment on the Lightroom version. I decided to test out these three methods to compare the results. But, I recently discovered that Adobe Photoshop CC now comes with its own skin smoothing plugin under the neural filters. I typically use the Portraiture plug in or the De-Blotch action (part of Totally Rad’s Pro Retouch 2.0) for skin smoothing. There are many actions on the market for touching up newborn skin and many ways you could go about it by hand in Photoshop. Then I use a skin smoothing action or plugin to give the baby’s skin a final polish. I also use different adjustment layers to correct red or jaundice skin tones. In Photoshop, I use the spot healing brush, the healing brush, and the patch tool to touch up little marks, flakes, and blemishes on newborn skin. That’s why I use a few different newborn skin smoothing techniques. Most parents who hire me to take newborn portraits want to remember their newborn with beautiful clear skin. Some newborns have beautiful clear skin, but more often a newborn’s skin can be flaky, blotchy, and have little bumps and scratches. Newborn skin can be tricky and time consuming to edit. As a newborn photographer, I am always looking for new ways to speed up my editing workflow and make my tiny clients look their best.
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