Shallow depth of field is one of the most important tools in any photographer’s arsenal. Depth of field is the measure of how much of your image is in focus, and shooting with shallow depth of field provides you with another way to bring focus to your subject. The ability to shoot with shallow depth of field is especially useful for portrait and sports shooters. However, achieving shallow depth of field requires a fast lens (that is, a lens that can open to a wide aperture) and you may not always have such a lens with your. Or, you might simply not realize at the time you’re shooting that a shallow depth of field is what the image needs. For those times when you need to remove depth of field from an image, Alien Skin has a Photoshop plug-in that can help.

A signficant part of the visual processing part of the human brain is devoted to face recognition. As such, we’re extremely sensitive to slight changes in skin color – a blush that might show embarrassment, for example – and texture. In addition to good lighting, one of the best ways to make portraits appear more attractive is to do a little work on your subject’s skin, not just to hide blemishes and possibly reduce wrinkles, but to soften and smooth skin texture in general. Imagenomic’s Portraiture 2.0 plug-in is an excellent one-stop tool for performing sophisticated skin corrections.

These days, most of the color correction tools that you’ll find in a typical image editing package are fairly easy to use. However, that doesn’t mean that accurately correcting a color is necessarily easy. Recognizing the correct hue for a particular subject can be very difficult, and few subjects are trickier to correct than human faces. Becuase our eyes are so sensitive to facial recognition, and because even subtle changes in flesh tone can have big emotional impacts, correcting skin tones is one of the most difficult tasks you’ll face as a digital photorapher. That’s why PhotoTune Software created SkinTune, an $80 Photoshop plug-in designed specifically for correcting skin tones.