How to achieve the porcelain

[olive]

I understand the porcelain look - smooth skinned look of children and portraits are mostly done post production... however, can anyone tell me how? I love my results but, would like to smooth them a bit more with clarity. I currently use Paintshop pro x3.
Thank you for all your thoughts and efforts,

[zona5101]

I think most are done with specific software such as Portrait Professional or Imagenomic's Portraiture. I believe both have try before you buy downloads available if you visit their websites...

[olive]

Which is the preferred I guess I need to figure out... which is easier to control and use?

[ravncat]

Also look at high pass filter uses, I'm not sure if that is the "porcelain" look or not, but it could be described in such a manner

[Photologyst]

Originally Posted by olive

Which is the preferred I guess I need to figure out... which is easier to control and use?

They are both very simply to use. However, they are different products.

Portraiture will only affect the skin coloured portions of a photo or whatever portion of the skin that you have selected for enhancement. It can also “glamorize” the whole photo with different lighting effects but it will not adjust features.

Portrait Professional allows you to adjust all the features, e. g. eyes, noses, necks, hair colour, lips, etc. and it can adjust the whole photo as well. While you have to be very careful not to make your people look like aliens, it is much less tedious and time consuming than doing all of that by hand in Photoshop.

Both have their uses and are very good programs well worth the money.

Try them and see.

[teaking]

Theres lots of ways to make skin pale, one good video tutorial I have sawis this: YouTube - White Skin its probably a little over the top but can easily be toned back.

Another popular feature in conjunction with this is sometimes to desaturate skin and heres another good tutorial I have saw on this: ModelMayhem.com - A better way to desaturate

These may not work with your workflow or you may have a better way of doing it your self, I just thought they may be inetesting and good starting points for others

Hope it may help.