Imagenomic Portraiture 4.5 Build 4501 — Mac version

Portraiture’s AI smoothing engine works across a 100-megapixel file without breaking stride, which means you spend less time zoomed to 400% chasing every pore. It sits inside Photoshop and Lightroom Classic as a plugin, handing you a mask and a handful of sliders instead of fifty tiny brush strokes.

• Open a portrait in Photoshop, duplicate the layer, then launch Portraiture from the Filter menu
• The plugin auto-detects skin tones and builds a mask — check it with the black-and-white overlay view
• Dial in Smoothing for the broad skin texture, then use the Fine, Medium and Rough sliders to keep eyebrows and hair crisp
• Push the Enhance sliders — Warmth, Contrast, Sharpness — to bring back a bit of life after smoothing
• Toggle the preview on and off to catch any over-softening before you commit

Once you’ve found a setting that suits your lighting setup, save it as a preset. A full shoot of sixty headshots becomes a couple of clicks each, not an afternoon hunched over a Wacom.

When the plugin won't show up in Photoshop

The plugin not showing up in Photoshop is the one I hear about most. Nine times out of ten it's because Portraiture installed to the wrong folder. The installer offers separate builds for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, and the Photoshop one expects to land in Applications/Adobe Photoshop [version]/Plug-ins. If you pointed it somewhere else during install, just drag the Imagenomic folder into that Plug-ins directory and relaunch.

On Apple Silicon machines running Photoshop in native mode, an older Intel-only build won't appear in the Filter menu at all. The current version 4.5 handles both architectures, so if you're seeing nothing, double-check you've got the right build — the download page lists them separately.

Another gotcha: the preview window showing a blank grey square instead of your image. This usually means the graphics acceleration in Photoshop is tripping over itself. Head to Photoshop's Preferences, then Performance, and untick Use Graphics Processor. Restart Photoshop, open Portraiture again, and the preview should come back. You can re-enable the GPU afterwards — some Macs just need that first launch to settle.

Sometimes the mask picks up background tones that are close to skin — beige walls, warm wood, sand. Switch the mask view to black-and-white and bump the Skin Mask Sensitivity slider down a touch. If that still grabs too much, use the eyedropper to sample the problem area and tell Portraiture to exclude it.

Don't test this on a paid shoot yet

Don't dive straight into a paid job. Grab a folder of old portraits — the ones where the lighting was a bit flat or the model had a late night — and run through them one by one. The goal isn't perfect results. It's learning what the sliders actually do on your own files, not on the sample images in tutorials.

Build two or three presets early and name them sensibly: "studio key light", "window light women", "harsh sun men". The naming matters more than you think. Six months later you won't remember what "preset 7" did, but "overcast softbox" tells you straight away.

Leave the Enhance sliders alone for the first few sessions. Get the smoothing right first — the warmth, contrast and sharpness are seasoning, and it's easier to add them once the texture looks natural. A common mistake is pushing Sharpness to compensate for too much smoothing, and you end up with plastic skin and crunchy eyelashes in the same frame.

Also worth doing: open the same portrait twice, run Portraiture on one layer and manual frequency separation on another, then toggle between them. It teaches you what the plugin handles well and what it doesn't, so you'll know when to reach for a different tool.

A full retouch workflow, start to finish

Say you've got a tight headshot, studio-lit, and the subject has visible pores, a few blemishes and slightly uneven skin tone. Here's how I'd run it.

Prep the file. Open in Photoshop, duplicate the background layer, remove obvious distractions first — stray hairs across the face, a spot on the collar. Portraiture smooths skin, it doesn't clone out a crisp packet in the background. Do that now.

Launch Portraiture. With the duplicate layer selected, go to Filter > Imagenomic > Portraiture. The plugin opens with its auto mask already applied. Switch the preview to the mask view — the black-and-white one — and check it hasn't grabbed the lips, the whites of the eyes, or the edge of the hairline. If it has, drop the Sensitivity a few points or paint a quick exclusion with the mask brush.

Dial the smoothing. Start with the main Smoothing slider around 40 for a studio shot like this. Check the Fine detail slider — if the pores vanish entirely, back it off until there's a hint of texture left. Real skin has pores. The Medium and Rough sliders keep the larger structures intact; leave them near their defaults unless the face looks waxy.

Add a touch of enhancement. Once the texture looks right, nudge Warmth up by two or three points if the smoothing cooled the skin down. A tiny bump to Contrast — maybe five points — stops things looking flat. Skip Sharpness unless the eyes went soft, and even then, you're usually better off sharpening the eyes on their own layer afterwards.

Apply and mask back detail. Hit OK, let Photoshop render the result, then add a layer mask to the retouched layer. Grab a soft brush at 30% opacity and paint black over the eyebrows, eyelashes, lips, and any jewellery. You want those sharp. If the catchlights in the eyes lost their sparkle, mask those back too.

Final check. Zoom to 100% and flip the retouched layer on and off. The difference should be visible but not obvious — the person looks like they slept well, not like they've been through a Snapchat filter. Save your preset if you liked the result, then flatten and export.

Spacebar panning and the auto-hide mask toggle

Dragging the preview around with the hand tool is fine, but holding the spacebar lets you pan without switching tools. Small thing, saves constant trips to the toolbar.

The mask brush has an auto-hide toggle — a little eye icon near the mask preview. Click it and the mask overlay disappears while you paint, so you can see the actual skin tones you're including or excluding. Much easier than painting blind through a red wash.

If you hold Option while clicking a preset, Portraiture applies it without closing the plugin. Handy when you're comparing two saved settings on the same image — click, check, click the other, check again. No repeated trips through the Filter menu.

The preview window's split view — before on one side, after on the other — can be dragged left and right to reposition the dividing line. Default puts it dead centre, but dragging it over the most detailed part of the face gives you a better read on what's changing.

Keyboard shortcuts inside the plugin are sparse, but Esc closes it without applying, and Enter commits the effect. That's enough to keep you moving once you've got your preset dialled in across a batch.

About two seconds on an M1 Mac

On a 24-megapixel raw file, Portraiture 4.5 applies a preset in about two seconds on an M1 Mac. A 45-megapixel file from a D850 takes maybe four or five. It's not instant, but it's fast enough that you don't reach for your phone while waiting. Older Intel machines feel a bit more laboured — an i7 Mac mini from 2018 chews for eight or nine seconds on the same file — but it's still quicker than manual retouching by a wide margin.

RAM usage sits around 400-600MB while the plugin is open, which is modest given what it's doing. I've run it alongside half a dozen other filters and a few smart objects without Photoshop complaining. On machines with 8GB of RAM you'll want to close other heavy apps first, but 16GB and above handles it comfortably.

Stability is solid. I've thrown a hundred-layer composite at it, a 16-bit TIFF, a flattened JPEG from a ten-year-old camera — it hasn't crashed Photoshop once. The only wobble I've seen is a slow redraw when the preview is set to Actual Pixels on a high-res display, and that's more about the GPU than the plugin.

Batch processing through Lightroom Classic is where the speed really shows. Select forty frames, pick your preset, and Portraiture works through them one by one without opening the plugin interface. You can walk away and come back to a folder of retouched shots. Just make sure you've tested the preset on a couple of frames first — batch-applying a bad setting is a quick way to waste an evening.

• Build 4501 ships with a next-generation AI smoothing engine

• macOS 13 or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac
• Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom Classic