[admin]

Sharpening increases the contrast of the detail in the skin. Putting the skin texture slider down so it's negative decreases the contrast of the texture in the skin, so what you've done is get the two things to cancel each other out. Another way of approaching it, would be to mask out the skin when sharpening the rest of the picture. Typically in portraits you'd want to sharpen the eyes and the mouth but not the skin, which is why we have sharpening sliders for those features.

Tony