SkinFiner

About SkinFiner

Skin retouching in a general purpose editor is a long job done with frequency separation, dodge and burn and a lot of patience. SkinFiner collapses that into a small application with a handful of sliders that were tuned for one subject only, which is why a portrait that would take twenty minutes by hand comes out in about two.

The smoothing model separates texture from tone rather than blurring both together. Tone gets evened out across the face, blotchiness and redness settle down, and the fine texture that makes skin look like skin stays where it is. That is the difference between retouching and the waxy result that a plain blur produces, and it is the whole reason the tool exists.

Beyond smoothing there is a small set of corrective controls: blemish removal with a spot tool, shine and highlight reduction on foreheads and noses, tone and warmth adjustment for mixed lighting, and separate handling for shadow and highlight areas of the face. Masks limit any of it to a region so eyes, lips and hair are left untouched.

It works as a standalone editor and as a plugin inside a host editor, so a frame can be sent out, retouched and returned as a layer without leaving the main document. Batch processing applies a saved preset across a whole shoot, which is the realistic way to handle event and portrait volume rather than opening every frame.

What is included in this build

• Texture preserving skin smoothing that separates tone from fine detail
• Blemish and spot removal with a single click tool
• Shine and highlight reduction on foreheads, noses and cheekbones
• Skin tone and warmth correction for frames shot under mixed lighting
• Separate shadow and highlight handling across the face
• Masking so eyes, lips, hair and background are excluded from the effect
• Standalone application plus a plugin path into a host editor
• Batch processing with saved presets across an entire shoot

Changed in version 5.7.2

• Improved edge handling around hair and eyelashes
• Faster batch processing on large sets of high resolution frames
• New default presets covering portrait, event and beauty work
• Better tone correction on frames with strong colour casts
• Reduced memory use on very large source files

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Extract the archive to a folder with a short path.
2. Close any host editor before running setup so the plugin registers correctly.
3. Run the installer as administrator.
4. Point the plugin path at the host editor's plugin folder during setup.
5. Restart the host editor once so the plugin appears in the filter menu.

System requirements and file details

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