Question for the portait shooters...

[Wes]

What is the one Photoshop Action and/or Plugin that you absolutely could not do without? Why?

[CaptainTom]

noise ninja because I like to take out ANY possible color noise and it also gave me some control over skin clarity. CS3 may limit my use of NN because it has a new clarity slider in RAW.

[srwatters]

Adobe Camera RAW. No explanation needed

[AndrewCCM]

iCorrect Portrait for skin tone/WB and/or Imagenomic Portraiture for quick simple retouching.

There are some more powerful tools for retouching like Portrait Professional that are nice and provide a lot of extra functionality for skin retouching, but not quite as fast. I use it on occasion.

[JohnT]

Imagenomic Portraiture. It saves me hours of retouching. Noise Ninja is a close second.

[Wil_Bloodworth]

Portraiture as well. I also have this simple one that I've attached... it has nothing to do with skin tones really... install it and play with it.

There are a couple of common actions in there that I use quite often... like luminance sharpening and the darks/lights action that I'm talking about above.

Enjoy!

- Wil

[luis_relampago]

I second "Adobe Camera RAW"

[Shelby Lane]

+3 for ACR.

[Corrie]

I have this cool green tinted Michelle Black action that I like when ever I am playing around. Other than that I have mostly recorded how I like things and run them when I edit. I have editing down to a science. More than 1 or two minutes on an image and I am over it lol. I never use anything like noiseware because I like grain.

[AndrewCCM]

Originally Posted by Shelby Lane

+3 for ACR.

Gotta say that since I started using Lightroom (back to the beta days), I cannot think of the last time I used ACR (albeit, LR uses the same engine).

[Wes]

Okay, I see a lot of responses for ACR. Honestly, I never use it. I do all of the editing of my RAW files in Bibble. I played around a bit in ACR last night (after reading this thread) and don't see how it would be any better than Photoshop for working with skin (smoothing, tones, touchups, etc.). What am I missing? What does ACR do so well? I've received differing answers from photographers that I highly respect. I realize that there's more than one way to skin a cat, but, like I said, I'm curious as to what ACR does so well.

[JohnT]

Originally Posted by Wes

Okay, I see a lot of responses for ACR. Honestly, I never use it. I do all of the editing of my RAW files in Bibble. I played around a bit in ACR last night (after reading this thread) and don't see how it would be any better than Photoshop for working with skin (smoothing, tones, touchups, etc.). What am I missing? What does ACR do so well? I've received differing answers from photographers that I highly respect. I realize that there's more than one way to skin a cat, but, like I said, I'm curious as to what ACR does so well.

ACR in CS4 now sports all the touch-up tools that LR2 has. It's likely the ACR responders are referring to v.4. But, I'll wait to see what they say. :-)

[Shelby Lane]

Originally Posted by AndrewCCM

Gotta say that since I started using Lightroom (back to the beta days), I cannot think of the last time I used ACR (albeit, LR uses the same engine).

I know. I keep saying that once things slow down I'll take the time to play around with it, but so far, it just hasn't happened. But I hear it time and time again.

[Shelby Lane]

Honestly, I don't do much retouching, so your skin smoothing etc is all something that I would do in Photoshop. I use ACR to process my images from RAW because it is a good tool for the job and I didn't have to pay for it separately from Photoshop. I don't know that it's a better tool than something like Capture One or one of the other processors. It's just the one thing that I use every day, and I do most of my image work in it. For the most part, once it comes out of ACR, it gets sold, not Photoshopped. But I can get away with that because I primarily photograph kids.

[LWimages]

I use Aperture, Photoshop, and Noise Ninja.
I've created PS actions and collected many free ones. There are a total of 28 that I use on a regular basis.