skin softening

What plugin/preset do you use for skin softening of wedding photos?
Do you use it in batch?

Thanks for answers in advance!

How could one batch process skin softening when the skin is in different areas from shot to shot. Almost all who retouch skin do so on a photo by photo basis. I use Lightroom, using the healing spot tool as well as brushing in negative clarity.

Yes, you cant batch process skin processing. For weddings I dont do much in the way of skin processing except for a few of the bridal portraits. Thats not to say I dont do some spot cleanup but not the whole skin softening route. Thats fairly time intensive even if you use a plugin or action.

mjordanke wrote in post #16885400
What plugin/preset do you use for skin softening of wedding photos?
Do you use it in batch?

Thanks for answers in advance!

You'll spend a crazy amount of time doing that for every bride photo. Just retouch blemishes.

I use the two layer/gaussian blur/history brush method, it works quite well.

I've seen quite a few different methods - here's one that seems to work well, gives you a lot of control over how much skin texture is retained, and is fairly easy.

http://www.ppmag.com …softening-skin-kelby.html

On 50 year reunion classes I import into LR with a setting of -30 clarity - then adjust individually as needed. Negative clarity works very nicely in many cases. Too much turns skin to plastic.

Could you elaborate on this, or point me to a document or link?

Thanks!

Steps:

• Take care of glaring skin issues first, large pimples, etc. by cloning/healing
  
• CTRL-J to make a copy layer of your subject material
  
• Create a new history snapshot
  
• Surface blur that layer to taste, usually threshold is about 1/2 the radius or so (depends on subject)
  
• Create a new history snapshot of that blurred result
  
• Click on the first history snapshot (gives you back the original view)
  
• Set the history brush flag on the 2nd history snapshot (the blurred one)
  
• Get the history brush, size it accordingly and set strength to around 30% or so, make it a soft brush
  
• Touch up the face as needed, if you need more just go back over again