SkinFiner

Overview

Skin retouching by hand is slow. Frequency separation, dodge and burn, healing pass after healing pass, and an hour of work on a single portrait before the client has even seen a proof. SkinFiner exists to compress that into a couple of minutes for the frames that do not justify the full treatment, which on a wedding or event set is most of them.

The engine works by separating skin texture from skin tone and treating them independently. Smoothing acts on the tone layer so pores, fine hair and the texture that makes a face look like a face survive the pass, while blotches, redness and uneven patches are levelled out. Push it hard and the result becomes obviously retouched, but at sensible settings the change reads as good lighting rather than as software.

Detection finds the face automatically and builds a skin mask from colour and shape, so eyes, lips, eyebrows, hairlines and background are excluded without hand painting. The mask is editable with a brush when the automatic pass is too generous or too shy, and multiple faces in the same frame are handled independently so a group photograph does not receive one compromise setting across everyone in it.

Around the smoothing sit the corrective controls: blemish removal with a healing brush, tone adjustment for warmth and evenness, shine reduction on foreheads and noses, teeth and eye brightening, and colour balance for correcting a cast picked up from a coloured wall. It runs as a standalone application and as a plugin inside the usual host editors, and batch mode applies a saved preset across a whole folder for a first pass on a large shoot.

Key Features

• Texture and tone separation so smoothing preserves pores and fine detail
• Automatic face and skin detection with an editable brush based mask
• Independent handling of multiple faces in the same frame
• Blemish removal with a healing brush for spots, marks and stray hairs
• Shine and highlight reduction on foreheads, noses and cheekbones
• Tone evening for redness, blotches and uneven patches
• Eye and teeth brightening with subtlety controls
• Colour balance and warmth correction for casts from coloured surroundings
• Batch processing across a folder using a saved preset
• Runs standalone or as a plugin inside the common host editors

What Changed in This Build

• Improved skin detection on darker skin tones and side lit faces
• Faster processing on high resolution files from recent camera bodies
• New preset set covering natural, editorial and beauty levels of retouching
• Better edge handling where skin meets hair

System Requirements

Processor	Intel or AMD 64-bit, 2 GHz or faster
Memory	4 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended for high resolution files
Graphics	Any card with a current driver
Storage	500 MB free
Display	1920 x 1080 or higher with reasonable colour accuracy

Release Details

Full title	SkinFiner
Version string	5.7.2
Publisher	SkinFiner
Category	Photo Editing
Licence	Full version, no term limit
Platform	Windows 7 through 11, 64-bit
Interface language	Multilingual, 9 interface languages
Archive size	128 MB
Mirrors	4 active, all reporting online
Listed	refreshed 2 months ago, checked again 40 minutes ago

Installation Notes

• Work on a copy or a duplicated layer. Retouching decisions that look right on a small preview often need pulling back at full size.
• Check the result at 100 percent before exporting. Smoothing that looks natural at fit to screen can be obvious at print size.
• Build a preset per lighting setup rather than per photograph, then batch the set and hand correct the outliers.

Before You Start

Read the notes above before running setup. Most of the problems people write in about are covered there, and almost all of them come down to an older version of the same software still being installed, a graphics driver that predates the release, or a security suite quarantining part of the package mid install.

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