Skin softening airbrushing software (updated)

There's a few different software's about for skin softening/airbrushing.  Here are the main contenders

Portrait pro.  This offers face sculpting as well as skin softening, and has options for changing eye/lip colours etc, probably the most popular of the bunch it does require you set a number of key point first (not difficult really) although it does take a minute or so and makes batch processing difficult or impossible.
Price around £50

Imagenomic Portraiture.  This is much more basic and easier to use, it finds the skin tones fairly well without having to be told, but doesn't offer so many options as portrait pro but does the skin softening quite nicely.  It will also work as a batch process if added as part of an action in photoshop.
Price around £100

Digital Anarchy Beauty box.  Another fairly simply one, this again finds the skin areas by itself and offers much the same options as portraiture.
Price around £100

Photoshop.  Photoshop doesn't have any built in option for skin softening but can be used by making a new layer, bluring that and then masking (or earsing) the bits like hair, eyes, lips, etc.
Price varies with version but starts around £50+

Perfect 365 by ArcSoft, another of the simpler ones to use, although mine keeps asking for the serial number everytime I try to save an image which is a pain in the arse.

For some comparrison here are some images done with those softwares, not I have had little time to play with some of them so with practice better results could be obtained with most.

Some news

Well it seems the royal family are up in arms about topless pics of kate Middleton, I'm afraid I have no sympathy myself.  She knows the press watch her every move and she goes topless, then they wonder why the press publish the photos.
Lets face it nobody else has access to as much private land as then and yet she chooses to go topless in a place you can see from the road?  Either stupid or she wants to get in the papers..

Sir Ranulph Fiennes now 68 is planning an expedition to the pole in the winter, he could face temperatures as low as -90.... so much for global warming then.

Insurgents (used to be called Al Qaeda) have attacked camp bastion, first they claimed it was in revenge for a film mocking the prophet Mohamed, then changed it to an attempt to kill prince harry who stationed there.
A few things come to mind, why was the movements of a soldier on active service told to the press to publish, why did Al Qaeda change their story and the reason for their attack. 
But the biggest question of all is why are our troops sill out there?   There will never be peace in that country, especially with what is effectively an invading army there.

A few new shots

Open letter to discovery channel

Can we please have some programs that don't have fish/crabs, or auctions/picking,  guns, gold and cars.

Just for a change how about some more programs made outside of the USA, your not doing the country any favors showing many of the programs you show.  lets face it despite what Americans think they are about the least popular people in the world, and your showing the worst side of them, lets look at what I mean.

American guns.  As a business driving around in a helicopter and setting off large explosions is a waste of money, it's posing and childish.

Gold divers  see the post next to this one.

American chopper. Tantrums, arguing, and how about building a bike that's actually practical to ride every day to work?

Gold rush.  Well what can I say, the miners forgot to pay the lease and lost the mine...Dohhh!  Agian, more attitude that ability, programs boring watching them make a loss every week, fat men with beards arguing.

Deadliest catch.   More men arguing and getting wet
.
Mythbusters.  one of the few programs with little or no arguning, big problem is they over complicate the myths, but otherwise not a bad program.

Born survivor, now finished as you sacked Bear Grills.

Finding bigfoot, this lot couldn't find a brick in a paper bag, they go crashing throgh the woods scaring all the wildlife away.

Flying wild alaska, to be honest after watching this program I'm supprised the FAA hasn't shut them all down.

Storm chasers.  men shouting at each other and panicking a lot.  If your scared shitless don't go in the first place.

Weird or what, interesting idea, but doesn't actually tell us anything we didn't know before, maybe try and explain the things?

Worlds toughest drive, not that tough obviously as two unfit tv presenters had already driven to the north pole on top gear..

Whale wars, I've mentioned before on the blog.


You really need to move outside to the rest of the world a bit more, theres so much your missing, if nothing else cut down on men arguing, I can see that any day, I don't need to watch Discovery to see it.

Gold divers

I saw this the other night and I won't be watching it again, the smell of testosterone even on telly was too much for me. And why do grown me have to say "dude" every five seconds. I mean it's so bloody 1080's Don't men grow up in the US.... silly question really isn't it.

Some sunsets

Heres a few recent sunsets, both taken on the compact as I was traveling light.
The top pics is taken at Porthcawl and the bottom from the side of Corn-du, both in south Wales

Some from yesterday

I have been pretty busy recently and have had some internet issues with my sons computer so haven't been on here for a while, here are a few shots from yesterday.
These are all taken on a fuji compact as I'm traveling light at the moment.