Q: How do you deal with skin that has a lot of pores or wrinkles without a heavy handed approach and hours of work in Photoshop, struggling to repair each image?
A: In Lightroom, set your Clarity to -100.
Now normally that would make your whole image soft or blurry and you don't want that, but there is also a Clarity slider in the Adjustment Brush (keyboard shortcut K). This is where the Adjustment Brush hides, and the Clarity slider set to -100:
This is way faster than doing it in Photoshop (even if you know how), its very adjustable because you can adjust the amount of effect along with adjusting the mask, and if you net shot is framed the same way, you can sync the adjustment in (or copy & paste) to any number of images.
You can double the effect by clicking on New and adding another Adjustment Brush "layer" and repeating the brushing. Here's the same area with two layers of negative clarity:
Notice that the eyes and eyelashes are still super sharp, as is the eyebrow and the area below it, but the skin is much smoother and the under eye wrinkles are minimized. Some would say this look is too plastic, and I'm not one to disagree because I went over the top here with the effect, but if you need to prepare a dozen images for the client to see, and you don't have a week to retouch everything, this is a good alternative. And when the client picks the image they are going to use, you can still go back and do it the old way.
