DIY Photography is giving away a few copies of Portrait Professional as prizes in a portrait contest, so I decided to take a look at a demo of the software. I find myself doing more with Aperture’s retouch and clone tools and was curious if this would be a more automated way of cleaning up wrinkles, imperfections, and the circles under the eyes everyone seems to be sporting today.
Portrait Professional is different in that it’s not a localized retouching tool, but rather one for global enhancement based on a training set of beauty images. (The former artificial intelligence student in me wonders what kind of neural network or other training system they use.) You define key points on the face (eyes, nose, mouth), and it maps the enhancements onto them. The various changes are adjustable, and they also have localized tools for fine-tuning.
My quick review consisted of four photos from portrait-specific shoots and more candid event photos. I tried to keep each one to a 5-10 minute trial, since that’s about as much time as I would spend retouching in Aperture, and in most cases used the default male/female settings.
On portraits I didn’t retouch in Aperture, Portrait Professional takes it a step further by smoothing the skin and reshaping the face. I found the reshaping to be impressive though somewhat extreme to the point of leaving obvious artifacts, and had to reduce the effect.
Faces with more wrinkles and darker shadows under the eyes make a more interesting comparison. Again, Portrait Professional does a better job on the skin overall, while only softening other facial lines. I wasn’t able to adjust that correction to match the local effects of Aperture, though the softening would probably appear more natural in a larger print. In one case, the skin started to look plastic and unrealistic; I wasn’t able to scale it back globally and instead had to use their local retouching tool to bring back some texture. Eye circles were also softened without being totally eliminated as in Aperture.
Overall, the software is good at global skin and shape adjustments. The defaults can be extreme, but most can be easily tuned. Mapping facial points is generally a quick, straightforward process, and the side-by-side preview gives you a good comparison. It’s shortfalls depend on your aesthetic sensibilities and goals: shaping and smoothing can become unrealistic, while lines and circles are merely softened unless you manually retouch those areas.
For photographers doing extensive portrait work seeing a clean glamor look, Portrait Professional provides a new, more automated way of enhancement. For my own more limited portrait and retouching work, I’m satisfied with Aperture’s built-in tools for now.
