SkinFiner

SkinFiner is intended to help you retouch skin texture and tone in photographs. Its best advantage is that it saves you from the effort of doing most of this work manually as it can produce rather decent results without much user intervention.

It supports common picture formats like BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF as well as various RAW formats. Luckily, there is excellent online help documentation.

The tool's interface is not too different from those of other photo retouchers, which means that you can probably start using it right after installation without much difficulty. The largest space of the window is used for previewing the picture you are working on. Luckily, there are various ways to compare the original with the modified one. By default, you can use a button to momentarily switch to the source (single view); however, you can change the layout to have a side-by-side or a top-bottom view. There is also a left side panel, from where you can see a history of all your actions as well as take snapshots of your work at any moment. At the bottom of the window, you can browse folders and work with the photographs they contain.

Most of the work is done from the panel on the right. It is where you select the different presets, for example. By the way, it is quite easy to try some of the presets available, which include Skin tone-Contrast, Skin tone-Lightening, Smoothing High, Smoothing Light and Smoothing Medium. Yet, you can still manage your presets by creating new ones or importing others.

The panel is divided into various sections, which you can collapse to make room if you are not using it at the time. First, there is Skin Mask, which lets you select the regions of the photograph that correspond to the skin, so that other parts are not unnecessarily modified. However, you will probably notice that sometimes it is not even required to change the default mask, as the program is quite good at doing this automatically.

The second section is Skin Details, which lets you smooth the skin by adjusting various parameters while the other two sections are intended to correct skin imperfections and tone. Again, the automatic values work quite well most of the time. In this respect, it is remarkable that the program can actually smooth skin and remove any imperfections without altering its texture so much that the photograph starts looking too artificial.

Luckily, the program supports processing batches of photographs. However, in this mode, the tool will not allow you to use different presets for different pictures, which means that the results may not always be those you were expecting. However, it may come in handy when you need to work with a long list of images and high quality is not a great concern.

All in all, SkinFiner is one of the best choices for improving skin texture in a photograph without much effort. It is available both as a standalone program and a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. Likewise, it can be purchased with two different licenses: Home and Commercial. Luckily, the product can be tried at no cost, except that it leaves a watermark on the output photos.