Imagenomic Portraiture 4.5 Build 4501 Mac

Imagenomic Portraiture is a skin-retouching plugin designed to smooth and even out skin tones inside Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, with the current version 4.5 Build 4501 now requiring macOS 13 or later. The plugin runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel 64-bit Macs, and the product page also lists Affinity Photo as a supported host.

Batch skin smoothing across portrait sessions

• Photoshop and Lightroom Classic users who retouch portraits regularly
• Macs running macOS 13 Ventura or newer on ARM or x86 architecture
• Workflows that need consistent, AI-driven skin smoothing across batches

Separate downloads for each host application

• Separate downloads exist for the Photoshop and Lightroom Classic builds
• As of version 4.5, the AI smoothing engine has been upgraded to what Imagenomic calls a next-generation version
• The interface is available in English only

A wedding editor’s Monday morning

A wedding photographer returns from a Saturday shoot with just under 400 ceremony and reception frames that need faces cleaned up before the client gallery goes live. The light was harsh during the outdoor vows, and the dance-floor shots are a mix of flash and warm tungsten that pulls reds out of every forehead. Opening the first raw in Photoshop, she launches Portraiture from the Filter menu. She masks a small patch of cheek on the bride, samples it, and gets a skin map that already ignores the veil, the suit lapels, and the floral arch in the background. She saves that preset as “Bride-Outdoor-Vows” and applies it across the rest of the ceremony selects without touching another mask. What would have taken her until Tuesday afternoon is finished before lunch.

Automated smoothing vs. frequency separation plugins

Skin-retouching plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic fall into two camps: ones that lean on frequency separation and ones that automate the heavy lifting with some kind of subject-aware smoothing. Portraiture sits in the second camp, and comparing it against Retouch4me Skin and ON1 Portrait AI shows where each one aims.

Retouch4me Skin works as an external application that sends a retouched layer back to Photoshop. It produces clean, clinical results, but the round-trip means it fits less naturally into a layered Photoshop workflow. Portraiture runs directly inside the host, so you can build it into an action, paint a layer mask over it, or reduce its opacity in one step without leaving the application. Photographers who live inside .psb files with dozens of adjustment layers tend to notice that difference within the first hour.

ON1 Portrait AI is more of a standalone raw processor that includes face detection and skin treatment. It is useful for someone who wants a single-application pipeline and doesn’t already own Photoshop, but it doesn’t operate as a plugin inside someone else’s layer stack. For a photographer who already edits in Lightroom Classic and rounds-trips to Photoshop for heavy retouching, Portraiture slots in at exactly the point in the workflow where skin work happens — after raw development, before final tone grading.

Where Portraiture sets itself apart from both is the mask-building step. It generates a grayscale skin mask that you can preview and edit before the smoothing is applied, and that mask respects edges and non-skin objects more reliably than the auto-masking in ON1. Retouch4me’s masking is internal and not directly editable, so if it mistakes a leather jacket collar for skin, you have to erase the result rather than refine the input. The trade-off is that Portraiture’s interface looks a little dated next to the slicker, single-purpose panels in newer tools, but the control it hands back — particularly the per-channel tonal range sliders for luminance and color — gives a retoucher more room to dial in a look than a one-button pass ever could.

A retouching workflow from raw file to gallery-ready portrait

This workflow assumes a single portrait opened from Lightroom Classic into Photoshop, but the steps apply to any headshot or editorial image where the face needs cleanup without losing texture.

1. Develop in Lightroom first. Fix white balance, exposure, and contrast. Remove sensor spots. Do not touch the Clarity or Texture sliders on the face yet; Portraiture handles skin texture separately, and doubling up creates a plastic look.
2. Send to Photoshop as a Smart Object. Right-click the image in Lightroom Classic, choose “Edit In → Open as Smart Object in Photoshop.” This keeps the raw development editable and makes the Portraiture filter non-destructive.
3. Duplicate the Smart Object layer. Label the copy “Skin Retouch.” The original sits underneath as a fallback for opacity blending later.
4. Launch Portraiture. With the “Skin Retouch” layer selected, go to Filter → Imagenomic → Portraiture 4. The plugin opens with the default skin map already masking most of the face.
5. Refine the skin mask. Use the Eyedropper tool inside Portraiture to click on a representative patch of skin — the forehead or the cheek, avoiding highlights and shadow edges. Adjust the mask preview to check that it hasn’t grabbed the eyebrows, the lip line, or the catchlights in the eyes. If it has, reduce the mask opacity in those areas with the Brush tool inside the plugin or tighten the tonal range sliders for Hue and Saturation.
6. Set smoothing strength. Drag the main Smoothing slider to around 30–40 for a natural look. Push the Fine, Medium, and Large detail sliders independently: keep Fine above the halfway mark to preserve pores, reduce Medium slightly to even out blotchiness, and drop Large only if the subject has visible texture irregularities like acne scarring.
7. Check the skin tone tab. Portraiture includes a Skin Tone panel that adjusts hue, saturation, and luminance only within the skin mask. Use it to reduce reds on noses and ears without affecting the subject’s shirt or the background. A small nudge in the Hue slider toward yellow and a 5–10 point drop in Saturation often fixes flash-induced redness.
8. Apply and return to Photoshop. The filter appears as a Smart Filter under the “Skin Retouch” layer. Double-click its name to re-enter Portraiture at any point.
9. Paint back detail where needed. Add a black layer mask to the “Skin Retouch” group and paint with a white, soft-edged brush at 80% opacity over the skin areas only. This keeps the retouching off the eyes, mouth, and hair. For the under-eye area, reduce the brush opacity to 40% so some natural shadow remains.

Ignoring the mask and leaving the slider at 100

Most early missteps come from treating Portraiture as a one-slider tool and ignoring the mask it builds. A few crop up repeatedly in retouching forums and photography groups.

• Leaving the smoothing slider at 100. The default can feel aggressive on anything shot at low ISO. New users often apply it, see a wax-figure result, and assume the plugin cannot produce a natural finish. Backing the slider to 30 and adjusting per-channel detail retention usually fixes this in seconds.
• Not sampling the right skin tone. The eyedropper sets the target range for the skin mask. Clicking on a blown highlight or a shadow area throws the mask off, and the plugin starts smoothing the background or leaving patches of skin untouched. Sampling a mid-tone area of the face before anything else avoids most mask problems.
• Applying Portraiture before raw development. Running the plugin on a flat, ungraded raw file forces it to work from the default Adobe color profile. Any white balance or exposure changes after the fact shift the skin tones underneath the smoothing, and the result often needs redoing. Get the raw development locked in first.
• Using it globally instead of with a layer mask. Applying Portraiture to the entire image means it touches every pixel that matches the skin map, including hands, arms, and any other exposed skin. That can look fine on a headshot but unnatural on a full-length portrait where arms should retain more texture than the face. A layer mask lets you control where the effect lands.
• Ignoring the batch-processing option inside the plugin. The interface includes a way to save presets and apply them across multiple open images. Photographers who retouch a set of 50 headshots one by one without setting up a batch often don’t realize the feature exists until weeks later.

Build three lighting-specific presets on day one

Once the plugin is in place and Photoshop or Lightroom Classic has restarted, a few habits make the first week smoother.

Build three presets on day one. Open a well-lit portrait, a backlit outdoor shot, and a flash-lit indoor frame. For each one, sample the skin, set the smoothing to taste, and save the preset with a descriptive name. These become starting points for every future session, and tweaking an existing preset is faster than building a new mask from scratch every time.

Check the “Show Mask” toggle frequently. Pressing the mask preview in the plugin window reveals exactly which pixels Portraiture will affect. In the beginning, checking this on every image trains your eye to spot where the mask needs tightening — typically around the hairline, the edges of glasses frames, and the transition between the lip and surrounding skin.

Test the Smart Filter workflow before a real job. Run through the full Lightroom-to-Photoshop round-trip with a test image, apply Portraiture as a Smart Filter, save the .psb file, and return to Lightroom. Confirm that the retouched file appears in the catalog and that double-clicking it reopens Photoshop with the Smart Filter still editable. Finding a snag during a paid project is avoidable.

Learn the keyboard shortcut for re-entering the filter. In Photoshop, double-clicking the filter name in the Layers panel reopens Portraiture with the previous settings intact. This is the fastest way to adjust smoothing after seeing the image at full resolution or after a client requests a lighter touch.

Experiment with the Skin Tone panel early. Many users discover it months after installing. It works independently of the main smoothing engine and can rescue skin color casts that Lightroom’s HSL panel cannot isolate without shifting the background. A five-minute session dragging its Hue and Saturation sliders on a difficult mixed-light portrait pays off later.

Build 4501 ships with what Imagenomic describes as a next-generation AI smoothing engine. The update also brings full native support for Apple Silicon Macs and raises the minimum system requirement to macOS 13.

• macOS 13 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit processor
• Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, or Affinity Photo