You might like the sliders, but I believe there are better ways to make all those adjustments within Photoshop outside the Portraiture 3 plugin. There is also an 'enhancements' section which includes presets, such as 'glamour,' and various sliders, including sharpness, softness, warmth, tint, brightness and contrast. You can also control smoothing on a percentage basis and portrait size, which defaults to 'Auto.' There are no perfect values for the sliders because every image and subject is different, but I have some comparisons below at 100 percent to show the different impacts that minimum and maximum smoothing slider values have on skin.

Further, you can control threshold (I found that I got more natural-looking skin by increasing the threshold to maximum). You have control over fine, medium and large smoothing. Portraiture 3 does exactly that without reducing other detail in the face, like eyes and eyebrows or lips. I don't want to remove fine details from a person's skin or make them look like someone else, I just want to enhance their best qualities. I found that the default settings produce very natural results which do an excellent job of smoothing skin without making it look fake or like plastic. Moving back toward what you can do within Portraiture 3, the smoothing works very well. I wasn't able to craft a good skin mask that captured both the lit and shadow areas of the skin. For example, I tried to work on an image where my subject was half-lit by an early evening sun (very warm light) and the other half of her face fell off into shadow (blue) and I could not create a custom mask that would let me edit her shadow skin because it wasn't within the range of colors the plug-in considers for skin tones. I found that the skin tone mask does not work well if your subject is lit with unusual colors. But you can output your adjustments directly to a new layer from the plugin, which can then easily be adjusted as you see fit with a layer mask and your preferred selection methods.

While the auto mask works well and there are tools to fine tune a custom mask, I do wish there was a brush within the plugin you could use to quickly eliminate areas from the mask, such as hair and fabrics. For example, I would reduce the effect of Portraiture 3's adjustments on the subject's lips and around the eyes slightly. By outputting the results as its own layer, it's easy to selectively apply the mask to the image. Before (left) and after (right) of the automatic skin mask and adjustments being applied.

Imagenomic portraiture