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Product Reviews<br />
PortraitPro 15<br />
Studio Max Edition<br />
Make Portrait Retouching Easy and Even Fun!<br />
Review by Jessica Maldonado<br />
› › photoshop user › february <strong>2016</strong><br />
122<br />
An experienced Photoshop user can take hours of meticulous attention<br />
to professionally retouch a portrait from start to finish. But how<br />
often do we have the luxury of giving our full attention to every<br />
image—especially for a large project or if we’re on a tight deadline?<br />
I reviewed and recommended PortraitPro back in ver sion 12,<br />
and now I have the pleasure of working with the PortraitPro 15<br />
Studio Max edition. It’s just as good as before, but with several<br />
new features that are just plain fun to use. (In fact, I found it hard<br />
to stop playing with it long enough to write this review!)<br />
PortraitPro instantly detects the faces in each image opened,<br />
and it’s an easy process to make any tweaks: Just drag around the<br />
outlines to match the face in your image. Out-of-the-box “after”<br />
results are pretty good, so you potentially have a retouched image<br />
ready to go in less than one minute. My lingering issue with the<br />
automatic results is that they include Face Sculpt. While a few portraits<br />
will require adjustment, and some clients may even request<br />
one (a smaller nose, perhaps), it irks me that it’s part of the default—<br />
even for children! But, it’s one click to remove, and easy to save a<br />
custom preset that doesn’t include Face Sculpt (especially handy for<br />
batch work). And, speaking of batch adjustments, they’re impressively<br />
fast, although they occasionally return some funkiness, so<br />
I’d recommend taking a peek at each image in your batch before<br />
closing out of PortraitPro, then you can tweak the face-detection<br />
outlines, where necessary, to avoid these aberrations.<br />
At the top of the control panel on the interface is a list of Presets,<br />
including a few that add makeup (new this version). No preset<br />
is perfect, but these make for good starting points. Everything<br />
is easily fine-tuned with sliders in each section, so it can’t hurt to<br />
flick through the presets rather than start from scratch. Again,<br />
with a couple of clicks, you can save your favorite results as custom<br />
presets.<br />
The Skin Smoothing Controls give great results, with separate<br />
sliders for the left and right under-eye areas, around the mouth,<br />
etc. There’s a long menu of skin texture fills, so skin will still look<br />
like skin, not just blurred or noisy. For larger blemishes that the<br />
controls can’t fix, there’s the Touch Up Brush (cousin to Photoshop’s<br />
Healing brush) for targeted zapping. Below that are the<br />
Skin Lighting Controls, where you can move the light source,<br />
adjust shadows, even add Left or Right Kick lights. If you go crazy<br />
in this section, you can create artifacts outside the face area, but<br />
you can resolve that by backing off on the adjustments. Down in<br />
the Skin Coloring Controls, there’s a new menu of skin settings,<br />
ranging from Illuminating Dew to Icy Frosting to help you get an<br />
Before<br />
After with Makeup<br />
even wider range of looks. All the skin sections let you view and<br />
edit the skin area easily (think Quick Mask or Refine Edge).<br />
Additional sections include Eye Controls and Mouth & Nose<br />
Controls, which give you sliders for each eye, the top and bottom<br />
lip, and teeth. You can brighten, sharpen, whiten, adjust eye and<br />
lip color, and even add contact lenses (I found this handy in a stock<br />
image where the iris texture was lost to noise).<br />
New to this version are Makeup Controls. Although these may<br />
not always be necessary, they’re totally fun to use, and they might<br />
come in handy if a photo shoot lacks a makeup artist or the model’s<br />
makeup has worn away. (As with every section/slider, however,<br />
too much can look fake.) I especially like the mascara and<br />
false eyelashes, which remind me of brushes that Corey Barker<br />
created for Scott Kelby’s book, Professional Portrait Retouching<br />
Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop. I’d love to see<br />
PortraitPro partner with a cosmetics company for real-world color<br />
palettes, but for now it’s great to be able to sample color from<br />
your photo or choose from the spectrum.<br />
This is powerful retouching software at a very reasonable price.<br />
The Studio and Studio Max editions can be used alone or as a<br />
Photoshop or Lightroom plug-in, handle RAW files directly, and<br />
support different color spaces. PortraitPro 15 Studio Max edition<br />
takes what can be a tedious, repetitive task, and gives good<br />
results quickly, so you can move on to other work—if you can tear<br />
yourself away from playing with it! ■<br />
Company: Anthropics Technology Ltd. Price: $239.90<br />
Web: www.portraitprofessional.com<br />
Rating: ◆◆◆◆◆<br />
Hot: Myriad features make retouching fast and enjoyable<br />
Not: Hair-coloring features and presets could be improved
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