More About Smoothing

As you know, nearly all SONOPP photographers are old smoothies.  That means they are always smoothing something, usually a digital image.  If you ask them what they mean by smoothing, they say "Smoothing is when you wrinkle less."

We've talked a little about smoothing in this series.  Click here for the most recent of these.  But we've never discussed the various actions and plug-ins that are available.  There are many of them, so for now, let's just study these three:

  • Kevin Kubota's "Makeup Artist" action from his Artistic Tools Volume II ($99)

  • Kodak "Digital GEM Airbrush Professional" plug-in ($100)

  • Imagenomic "Portraiture" plug-in ($170)

Comparison's are a little unfair, because for instance Kevin Kubota's Artistic Tools Volume II contains more than 50 other actions, including a "Digital Fill Flash" that operates much like ours as well as a fantastic effect called "Angel Glow" and another fine effect called "Daily Multi-Vitamin."  (We use the latter two nearly every day, but prefer our own Fill Flash and Dark Flash actions.)

Kevin's actions are sometimes not very adjustable, whereas the "GEM Airbrush" and "Portraiture" plug-ins have a wide variety of adjustments.  For starters, let's just compare "Makeup Artist" and the two plug-ins using default, out-of-the-box values.

Depending on your taste, the winner is probably one of the two plug-ins.  But they are close, one being a teensy bit softer than the other in default mode.

So how do they differ?  Well, both support 8-bit and 16-bit images.  Both can be applied to just a selection, such as the face only.  Both take about the same time to do their magic.  But...

  • The GEM Airbrush control panel offers three sliders (Fine, Medium, and Coarse) that let you tweak smoothing effects and intensity to maintain the character of your subject's face.  It also provides three standard setting buttons: Normal; Lighten; and Darken, which allow corrections to be applied to only darker areas, lighter areas, or both.  The best way to use the plug in is to work with the sliders slowly and move the Coarse slider and bit and watch what happens in the preview window. Then move the Medium, then the Fine, gradually fine tuning the effect.  There is also a Detail view, that  lets you preview the finished image as a high contrast mask that dramatically shows affected or unaffected image detail.

  • The Portraiture control panel offers a side-by-side before-and-after view, and allows control of detailed smoothing (4 sliders), skin tone masking (5 sliders and 1 check box), and various enhancements (5 sliders).  The enhancements include sharpness, softness, saturation (called "warmth"), brightness, and contrast.  There is a drop-down box featuring three smoothing settings (Normal, Medium, and High) and well as four enhancement combinations (Glamour, Tones, Low Key, and High Key).  Finally, the plug-in provides a powerful skin-tone masking tool so that smoothing applies to the skin tones only.  Since the mask is based on each image's skin tone range, it is ideal for batch processing.

Here's another comparison between the plug-ins.  Both plug-ins have been adjusted for slightly more smoothing than provided by their default values.  The Portraiture plug-in was easier to set: I simply selected "Normal" for the setting instead of "Default", and added 50% sharpening.

The Portraiture plug-in's one-click built-in enhancement settings (which are adjustable) are shown below as applied to the entire image:

 :

Final notes:  The last time we spoke to them, Steve and Julie Busch were using the GEM Airbrush on every senior portrait they produce.  We currently use one or the other plug-in every time a face is prominent in an image (unless it's Santa Claus).  They don't remove every possible blemish, nor should one expect that.  And sometimes the smoothing is too extreme, so then we use Edit-Fade or apply the plug-in to a duplicate layer and reduce the layer's opacity.

To those who say the person's face doesn't really look like that, we say, "Harsh reality is not what our clients are looking for when they hire a photographer.  People have their own built-in filters that remove nearly all blemishes from their memories of a face.  Our photography should capture those memories, not the harsh details."