Andrew Thomas Evans wrote:
The same goes for a lot of people on here and totally goes for a lot of people starting out. They see everyone talking about "high end retouching" when all it really does is waste a bunch of time and effort that could have been spent doing things that would have a larger impact on their shooting or their business.

As I said before here, it all depends on what the end client is looking for and meeting their needs and expectations. If a simple plugin does that and saves a bunch of time, then why chase around "learning" when it's not really going to amount to a huge benefit?

Depends on who is looking at your photos. You don't need to use pixel level D&B on every image, because this is not a recipe.

That's why there are retouchers and photograhers. You spend years to learn photography and we do the same with retouching.
So, you don't need to learn everything, just hire a pro retoucher. That's all

Anyway  I'm not trying to convince you that I'm right.

AJScalzitti wrote:

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner  

Why make an image only to mangle it?  If you must use a plugin consider imagnomics

+ 1000

Go with Imagnomics.  You will also increase your through-put substantially with this software.

Christian Bela wrote:
Every plugin-based retouched image is noticable.

Every single plugin-based retouched image that you notice is noticeable, yes. The ones you don't notice aren't.

And I'd be willing to bet there's a large chunk in that last category.

Still, most retouched images today have call-outs that are hard to overlook, plugin-based or not.