Brenton Parry

New Technology

Added 2021-03-25 09:47:34 +0000 UTC

New technology can be a dangerous game. We've all seen those posts on Instagram where we've thought "whoa, those filters have been ABUSED!"

The latest updates to Photoshop include a new "neural filter" that can do skin smoothing and I have to say it's a game changer. But can it go too far? In a rare moment I decided to test it on myself. This is a self portrait I took last year when I was actually working on a self portrait series. That has been abandoned for the time being due to covid insecurities.

The first image on the far left is my natural head, rough, sun damaged and real. The second is with minimal skin smoothing and increasing as you go to the right. It was actually a very pleasant surprise to see when I tested it, that it is very difficult to go too far. I cranked the settings up to the maximum and couldn't really notice much difference beyond what you can see here.

I have just used it to edit a relatively recent shoot and I think the images came up really well. There are a couple of my previous models who might not have thrown a tantrum at me had this software been around.