Beauty Is In The Beholder S Eyes

Using Beauty Is In The Beholder S Eyes: What It Actually Does and How to Make It Work

It's a Lightroom preset pack designed for beauty and portrait retouching workflows. The name sounds like something from a catalog you'd skip, but the files themselves are serviceable if you know what you're doing with them. Most people load these presets straight onto portraits and end up with that overly smooth, plastic skin texture everyone complains about on social media. That's not the fault of the presets alone, but it is the fault of using them without adjustment. The pack contains around 24 individual presets. They're organized into categories: skin smoothing, frequency separation alternatives, color grading for warm and cool tones, and eye enhancement. The eye enhancement presets are the ones people actually keep using. The skin smoothing ones cause problems if your source image has any noise to begin with. I learned that the hard way on a client job two years ago when I pushed one of the heavy smoothing presets onto a 400 ISO night portrait and the skin started looking like wax figurines. Every pore disappeared. The client was not happy. I ended up replacing it with a manual frequency separation pass and only used the lighter touch preset as a starting point.

Beauty Is In The Beholder S Eyes

The eye presets work because they're doing three things at once: brightening the sclera slightly, increasing local contrast around the iris, and pulling out the catchlights. The trick is that they apply all three simultaneously and they're not designed for every eye color. The default preset skews toward brown and hazel eyes. Blue and green eyes come out washed and a little gray if you run it full strength. Drop the opacity to around 60 percent for cool eye tones and bump the exposure back up by a quarter stop to compensate. That's the adjustment most guides don't mention. Here's the workflow I actually use instead of the default one. First I import the image and apply my base profile correction and lens distortion fix. Then I set white balance by hand rather than letting the auto read do its thing, because these presets were graded on specific white points and auto white balance throws them off. I drop in the skin smoothing preset at about 40 percent opacity, check the histogram to make sure I'm not clipping shadows in the hairline, and then layer the eye preset at whatever opacity the eye color demands. After that comes the color grade, which I usually dial back to 30 percent unless the subject specifically wants that warm editorial look. If the skin looks airbrushed, which it will in about half the cases, I go back and add a 10 percent noise overlay on a blank layer set to overlay blend mode before exporting. It brings back just enough texture to keep it from looking like a commercial rather than a portrait. The pack downloads from its official site for $19. There are cracked versions floating around, but they tend to be bundled with malware and the file hashes are frequently mismatched. You're better off paying the price and getting the actual files with their accompanying guide PDF, which is actually useful for understanding which preset pairs together rather than just throwing everything at a single image. The guide covers pairing recommendations, which is something the preset filenames alone don't make obvious. The skin smoothing and eye enhancement presets interact badly if you stack them both at full opacity on a single layer. That's a common mistake beginners make because there's no warning in the file names.

These presets struggle with heavily backlit images. The contrast recovery built into the color grading preset pushes highlights too aggressively and you lose detail in the hair and background. I've found that pulling the highlights down by two stops before applying any preset from this pack makes the results significantly more usable. It's not elegant but it works consistently across different lighting conditions. They also don't play well with heavy JPEG compression in the source file. If the original image has blocky artifacts, the skin smoothing preset amplifies them instead of hiding them. You'll see the blocks everywhere once you apply it. In those cases a proper denoise pass before the preset is necessary, and even then the results are only acceptable for web output, not print. If you're doing print work at 300 DPI or above, you're better off learning manual retouching techniques instead of relying on these. The presets save maybe fifteen minutes per image on quick turnarounds, but they won't replace actually knowing how to dodge and burn properly. The most underrated preset in the pack is the one called "Natural Luminance Boost." Almost nobody tries it because the name is boring and the preview thumbnail looks underwhelming. It does exactly what it says: lifts midtone luminance without affecting saturation. It's genuinely useful for flat-lit group shots where people look gray and tired. I use this one more than any of the others in a typical session now.

If you're buying into this, go in knowing that these are starting points, not finished solutions. They work when you treat them like a first draft. They look cheap when you slap them on and export. The difference between the two outcomes is about forty-five seconds of adjustment time per image, which honestly isn't much to ask.