SkinFiner

About this release

SkinFiner does one job and does it quickly. Portrait retouching in a general image editor means frequency separation, a stack of masks and a good half hour per face before anything looks finished. This tool collapses that into a handful of sliders that were tuned for skin specifically, and on a set of event or headshot images it turns an evening of work into a pass that takes minutes per frame.

The smoothing is what separates it from a blur. Texture and tone are treated separately, so the pores, fine lines and grain that make skin read as skin survive while the blotches, redness and uneven patches underneath them are levelled out. Push it too far and it will still look artificial, but the useful range is wide and the default settings land somewhere a client would accept.

Beyond smoothing there is tone control for evening out colour across a face, warmth and brightness for lifting a subject shot under bad light, and blemish removal with a brush for the spots that need attention individually. Skin detection is automatic and usually right, and where it is not there is a brush to paint the affected area in or out so hair, eyes, jewellery and background stay untouched.

It works both as a standalone application and as a plug in from a host editor, which means it can sit in the middle of an existing workflow rather than replacing it. Batch processing runs a saved preset across a whole folder, which is the mode that matters when a shoot comes back with four hundred frames and they all need the same treatment.

What it does

Texture preserving smoothing

Tone and texture are handled separately so pores and fine detail survive the pass.

Automatic skin detection

Skin areas are found without masking by hand, with a brush to correct the edges when needed.

Tone and colour evening

Redness, blotches and uneven patches level out across the whole face in one adjustment.

Blemish brush

Spot work for the marks that need individual attention rather than a global setting.

Batch processing

A saved preset runs across an entire folder, which is the only sane way to handle a full shoot.

Standalone or plug in

Runs on its own or from inside a host editor so it fits an existing workflow.

Changed in this version

• Improved skin detection on darker tones and mixed lighting.
• Faster processing on high resolution frames.
• New preset set aimed at natural results rather than heavy smoothing.
• Batch queue shows progress per file instead of a single bar.
• Fixed an edge artefact where skin met hair at high smoothing values.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive and run the installer.
2. Choose whether to install the plug in alongside the standalone application.
3. Point the plug in at your host editor folder if it is not detected automatically.
4. Build a preset on one representative frame before running a batch.

Worth knowing before you start

File details