Skin Smoothing Review by Seim Effects

Within 10 minutes of Gavin Seim’s Tweet asking for testers for some beta software he was trying out, I was fortunate enough to get on a list of the selected few!  I love testing out new techniques and new software so this was a pleasure for me.  Here is my rundown of SKIN, a smooth skin effect by Seim Effects:

Initial Thoughts:

Just look for yourself (no tweaking done, this is just click-and-go):

What impressed me:

• Auto-detection algorithms that soften the face but keep features like the eyes, lips, and hair sharp.
• Not overkill… And even if you think it is, the effect is fully adjustable through changing layer opacity. You can even add more for the ever-annoying barbie-doll, fake look.

Still needs some work on your part:

Like a lot of photoshop action or lightroom presets, this is not a “one stop shop”.  It still requires a bit of thinking and tweaking on the photo editor’s part.  The smoothing layer is partially blocked off by a layer mask which still needs to be adjusted a little.  Below is an image which shows layer mask itself over the image.  The white regions are kept sharp while everything else undergoes smoothing.

As you can see, you would need to additionally mask it to something like this in order to keep everything else sharp.  You don’t need to be exact but you should get it looking something like this (you only want the skin to be smooth):

Now depending on the amount of time you want to spend on this image you should probably add and remove your mask as needed.  Automatic does NOT mean “does it right every time” it means it does most of the work for you… you still need to “fill in the blanks” so to speak.  Every image will be different and some will be really easy to complete to your liking.

Final Thoughts:

After being fortunate enough to test this beta action that Gavin Seim created I’m excited to see what else will be a part of this new action pack.  I currently own Power Workflow 2 and use it quite often on many of my images. Depending on if the price is right, I would recomend this to anyone serious about increasing their throughput with their workflow.  Definitely a time-saver.

And for those of you who don’t already know, Gavin Seim is the man behind the Pro Photo Show.  Stop by and tell him I say hi!

Oh and did I fail to mention that Allison Budzier and Kim Popek are the coolest imaginary fairy models ever!?