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These time-saving apps will help you turn everyday portraits into client-pleasing art.
As a portrait photographer, your job is to make your clients look their best. Carefully planned lighting, posing and styling, along with your expertise behind the camera, will get you most of the way there, but post-processing is also an integral part of the job. Image-editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom get you just so far; sometimes using a plug-in to elevate your images to the next level is the most efficient solution. Some plug-ins are practical, offering tools that every portrait photographer needs to ensure that a subject's skin looks perfect (or close to perfect) but realistic. Others offer creative options that can be tweaked to represent your own unique style. Either way, adding plug-ins to your main image-editing program will generally save you time and help make your images stand out from the crowd. Check out these ten plug-ins to see which one best suits your portraiture style and post-processing needs.
ALIEN SKIN SOFTWARE EXPOSURE 5
Alien Skin Exposure 5 is all about style, especially for the portrait photographer who wants to create a unique look with the plug-in's many color and black-and-white options. In addition to a wide variety of film emulations and presets, Exposure 5 offers numerous tweaking options ranging from filters and toning to sharpening and focus (in case you want a little more bokeh). Equally important is the addition of new textures, which is a great bonus for those who love a vintage look. Other enhancements include individual controls for adding borders, dust, scratches and light leaks. Creative options are almost limitless, with long lists of styles in black-and-white and color, with various other categories such as Cinema, Lo-Fi and Cross Processing. Unless you're doing a funky senior portrait, you'll probably prefer the more subtle or gentle styles. But if and when you want to get edgy, Exposure 5 offers those options as well. Version 5 is a fairly major update to its predecessor and is the first Alien Skin plug-in that also functions as a standalone program. You'll also find an increase in workflow options as well as a redesigned user interface, a visual preset browser with live previews, and the convenient ability...