Kodak PlugIn for Portrait retouching

Some time ago, I read an interesting article about modern post-production-methods and how they start to supersede the need for a photographer in certain cases. This article was published in the October ’06 issue of PAGE, the german Playboy-sustitute for font-fetishists and designers. If you are interested: They made this article available as a PDF-download from their site, but as the magazine is quite vain, they charge you € 1,95 for it. As an alternative, especially for how to retouch portraits, I found an online-workshop over at Photographie.de. I guess you will be able to google a lot more like this.
The reason for this post is that I’d like to tell you about a Photoshop-PlugIn from Kodak. It’s called DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional and is aimed at the „Portrait-Post-Production-Process-Photoshop-Professional“ for skin-smoothing and making people look younger. I often call it the „20-years-younger“-filter, as you have to be careful not to push it over the edge. It’s easy producing those cheap magazine covers with that plastic-look surface, so beware! But at lower intensity this PlugIn is a real gem, making it a fuss to beautify your portrait-shots.

Today, I also read about this year’s Apple Design Awards. One of the winners is a little application which might be worth taking a closer look at: Picturesque is meant as a batch-beautifier for your pictures. Opposed to my first impression it is not a picture-optimizer, but adds up to 6 different effects to your photo, so you can easily fake my new logo used in this blog’s header (using the stroke- and reflection-capability). Probably this is useful for webgaleries.