In Lightroom (3.6) there's a preset for the adjustment brush for "Skin smoothing." For a quick-n-dirty edit for snapshots, it seems to work pretty well, though I wouldn't say it's a substitute for real portrait editing in Photoshop. It does a nice job of evening out skin tones and especially reducing hotspots and shiny spots.
The preset turns Clarity way down and turns Sharpness way up, and I'm having trouble getting my head around this concept. I think I "get" the concept of sharpness: To my understanding, it's kinda like increasing the edge contrast on a very small scale, turning the light side lighter and the dark side darker just to make the edge more pronouced. But I'm having trouble differentiating this from what the "Clarity" slider does. Can anyone explain?
Question 2, on a somewhat related note: Are overlapping adjustments simply additive? That is, if I turn up overall Clarity by +25, then paint over the whole image with a brush that turns the Clarity to -100, is that identical to just setting the whole image to -75? Or, if I move the slider to +25 and brush on -25, is that IDENTICAL to having done nothing at all? Or is there more to it than that?
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