Home  >>  Gear Reviews  >>  Review: Portrait Professional 8

Review: Portrait Professional 8

by Thomas Pitera

Portrait retouching can often be a very time consuming process. It requires a lot of skill, patience, and is often very intimidating to beginners. But what if there was a way to simplify the process by automating a lot of the control? Portrait Professional 8 is looking to do just that. Continue reading to see if it might save you time retouching portraits.

According to their website, Portrait Professional 8 is "an intelligent portrait airbrushing software that has been 'trained' in human beauty." The software allows you to make enhancements such as skin smoothing/softening, face shaping, blemish reduction, and hair adjustments simply by dragging sliders.

How it Works

When you launch the software, you have the option to load one of your own photos or use one of the sample photos they provide. For a portion of the review, I've used one of the provided female photos. After selecting the photo and gender of the subject you want to re-touch, you start by locating the features of the subject (eyes, nose, mouth, lips, overall head shape). There is a guide to the left of the photo that walks you through where you need to place the markers. Once the software has a general idea of where the features are located, you are able to fine-tune the selections to make sure they accurately highlight your subject's features. I would have liked to have seen the ability to add more points to the fine-tune selections in the cases where your subject's features aren't exactly like the presets. Other than that, the selection process is very simple.

Selection Process

The Selection Process

Once you've selected the features of the subject, you get to the heart of the software: the enhancement section. There are about seven different categories of sliders to choose from that correspond to different areas of the head. The software picks its default adjustment, but you can reset everything to zero and make your own adjustments. What's really nice here is there are a few presets that make all the slider adjustments for you to create a specific look. If you're working with large batches of images, you can also save your own slider settings and apply them to other images. For the photo below, I used the "Glamour Female" and "Turn Eyes Blue" presets, and made some minor adjustments. Mouse over the photo for the "before and after."

Before and After

Portrait Professional 8 Pre-Loaded Example Photo

You can see this makes a huge difference in getting rid of the blemishes on the face, as well as sculpting the face slightly. The skin softening might be a little over-done for my taste, but it's quite an improvement. It's surprising what a few clicks can do!

A couple of the control options also feature brushes for greater re-touching ability. The skin and hair brushes allow you to select the areas that the respective tools affect, while the touchup brush allows you to fine-tune blemishes. The nice thing about all of the retouch brushes is they work very similar to those in Photoshop: you can adjust the pixel radius and opacity. I'm sure some advanced users would have liked to have seen more brush options, but they are not essential because of the automation of the program.

For the next shot, I decided to use the second example photo and start all the sliders from scratch...

Before and After

Portrait Professional 8 Pre-Loaded Example Photo

I used at least one control tool from every slider. The biggest differences you can see are the shape of the face, the positioning of the neck, the smoothness of the skin and hair, and the color of the lips. The change is pretty remarkable considering I spent a little less than five minutes on the entire photo. The one thing I was a bit disappointed about was that I could not completely get rid of the blemish on the forehead. I went over it with the touch up brush, but the brush dialogue says it will always leave a faint texture to keep realism in the skin.

Conclusion

Portrait Professional is a remarkable piece of software that allows inexperienced users to get professional results easily and quickly. I was skeptical at first, but I was stunned as to how easy it is to get great looking results. I think people who specialize in portraiture should consider adding this to their workflow because the amount of time saved is incredible.

The one thing I was a little disappointed with was the lack of integration with other programs. The software does work pretty fast and of course it is a standalone product, but I was a little disappointed that it didn't at least offer a feature to export or open the photo in Photoshop (or whatever photo editing program you might use) once you have completed editing. Even though Portrait Professional does cut down the amount of time you will have to spend in Photoshop, some people will still have a need to bring the files in for other effects (edge darkening, sharpening, filter effects, etc.).

Portrait Professional 8 is available directly from the manufacturer at their website. It is fully compatible on both Mac and PC and comes in two different versions: Standard and Studio. The Standard ($79.95) works with 8-bit JPEG and TIFF files while the Professional Version ($119.95) also supports RAW and 16-bit TIFF files. You can check out a trial version here.

Posted to category: Gear Reviews on July 27, 2008