While Dynamic Skin Softener (DSS) is a good product and it can be dialed in to get similar softening results, I found the advanced eye dropper and some of the presets in Portraiture to be a big step ahead of what Dynamic Skin Softener can do.

However its power lies in the eye dropper too which goes beyond what Color Efex offers and actually lets you do skin samples as much as you like to pinpoint a range of colors that should be impacted by softening. Portraiture’s User Interface appears more complex at first, but it is pretty easy once you realize that it automatically does everything so you could just load it and click OK and get pretty good results most of the time. Portraiture’s User Interface on Windows 7 in 64-bit CS4 I used it and loved it for years, but when Portraiture 2.0 came out I started to find myself going to Portraiture more often to get the job done right very quickly. Included with this product was their crown jewel filter that many photographers use daily – their Dynamic Skin Softener (DSS) filter. I’ve been a big fan of Nik Software since 2007 and the first product I purchased from them was Color Efex. Portraiture –vs– Nik Software’s Dynamic Skin Softener (via Color Efex) Rather than just do a review of Portraiture, I thought it might be fun to add a little user education in it by doing a end to end walkthrough and while I’m discussing how Portraiture and its best competitor – Nik Software’s Dynamic Skin Softener (found in Color Efex) work. Portraiture is my “go to” skin softening product Imagenomic handles this very well in a package that looks intimidating the first time you load it up, but it’s 2.0 improvements help you get the hang of how it works quickly so it grows on your fast. In addition to the automatic mode you can use an eyedropper tool and take multiple samples to get great one pass skin softening on faces with multiple skin tones (i.e., shadows on face, rosy cheeks, etc…) which is something all of the other products I have used have failed to do in just one pass.

What this product does is skin softening but in a more subtle yet sophisticated way by automatically detecting the skin surfaces and only applying changes to them. Imagenomic is mostly known for its award winning Noiseware product, but there’s another Imagenomic product that I use all of the time – Portraiture.

Imagenomic portraiture discount