Alex had tried the manual way. He had spent two hours on a single close-up, dodging and burning, frequency separation layers stacking up like a house of cards. At this rate, he wouldn't deliver the photos until the couple’s first anniversary.
was the "magic wand" of the photography world. Before AI-powered filters were on every phone, professional skin retouching was a grueling, hour-long process of manual "frequency separation." Portraiture changed the game by offering intelligent skin smoothing Alex had tried the manual way
While companies like Imagenomic were selling the plugin for hundreds of dollars, ChingLiu provided a "frictionless" version to students and hobbyists who couldn't afford professional licensing fees at the time. The Impact on Photography dodging and burning