What's the best way to get the soft skin look in camera on the EX1R?

I've got a future bride that is going to need some, uh, assistance in the beautify department. Not being mean, but there's a lot of details that, well, umm.. You know. A lot of skin detail.

I normally doctor them up where needed in post, but I think I'm going to need to have the camera help carry some weight this time around.

Is there a "skin detail" setting or two that work good for more of a softer, dreamier skin look? How well does that work?

The EX cameras have Sony's Skin Tone Detail Correction system included in the picture profiles. By turning this on you can point the camera at a face (or any other coloured object) and select the hue you want to treat. By using the phase and saturation controls you can adjust the exact hue and hue range that will be treated. Then you can turn the detail level up and down for the selected range.

It works but is a little fiddly to set. I don't normally use it, instead preferring to shoot with slightly reduce detail level settings overall and then adding a diffusion filter in post production using Magic Bullet or similar. Another option would be to use a diffusion filter or similar on the camera, I like the Tiffen Gold Diffusion/FX for faces. If your budget won't stretch to that then don't forget that you can always stretch a very fine mess net over the lens such as a stocking for a pleasing diffusion effect. Again tricky to get just right, if the mesh is too big you'll see it, too small and you completely blur the image.

Alistair touches on an old film trick - one we used for over 20 years with a long-term lady client who was concerned how her skin looked. We used a black, fine denier stocking stretched over the back of the lens, not the front where there was no chance of the mesh ever coming near focus on our BVW507. I guess EX3 users could use that device.

You can get small metal rings for securing nets behind the lenses of 2/3" cameras. It is the best place to put you diffusion as the diffusion amount remains constant throughout the zoom range.