PSU_February_2016_PDF

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Product Reviews PortraitPro 15 Studio Max Edition Make Portrait Retouching Easy and Even Fun! Review by Jessica Maldonado › › photoshop user › february <strong>2016</strong> 122 An experienced Photoshop user can take hours of meticulous attention to professionally retouch a portrait from start to finish. But how often do we have the luxury of giving our full attention to every image—especially for a large project or if we’re on a tight deadline? I reviewed and recommended PortraitPro back in ver sion 12, and now I have the pleasure of working with the PortraitPro 15 Studio Max edition. It’s just as good as before, but with several new features that are just plain fun to use. (In fact, I found it hard to stop playing with it long enough to write this review!) PortraitPro instantly detects the faces in each image opened, and it’s an easy process to make any tweaks: Just drag around the outlines to match the face in your image. Out-of-the-box “after” results are pretty good, so you potentially have a retouched image ready to go in less than one minute. My lingering issue with the automatic results is that they include Face Sculpt. While a few portraits will require adjustment, and some clients may even request one (a smaller nose, perhaps), it irks me that it’s part of the default— even for children! But, it’s one click to remove, and easy to save a custom preset that doesn’t include Face Sculpt (especially handy for batch work). And, speaking of batch adjustments, they’re impressively fast, although they occasionally return some funkiness, so I’d recommend taking a peek at each image in your batch before closing out of PortraitPro, then you can tweak the face-detection outlines, where necessary, to avoid these aberrations. At the top of the control panel on the interface is a list of Presets, including a few that add makeup (new this version). No preset is perfect, but these make for good starting points. Everything is easily fine-tuned with sliders in each section, so it can’t hurt to flick through the presets rather than start from scratch. Again, with a couple of clicks, you can save your favorite results as custom presets. The Skin Smoothing Controls give great results, with separate sliders for the left and right under-eye areas, around the mouth, etc. There’s a long menu of skin texture fills, so skin will still look like skin, not just blurred or noisy. For larger blemishes that the controls can’t fix, there’s the Touch Up Brush (cousin to Photoshop’s Healing brush) for targeted zapping. Below that are the Skin Lighting Controls, where you can move the light source, adjust shadows, even add Left or Right Kick lights. If you go crazy in this section, you can create artifacts outside the face area, but you can resolve that by backing off on the adjustments. Down in the Skin Coloring Controls, there’s a new menu of skin settings, ranging from Illuminating Dew to Icy Frosting to help you get an Before After with Makeup even wider range of looks. All the skin sections let you view and edit the skin area easily (think Quick Mask or Refine Edge). Additional sections include Eye Controls and Mouth & Nose Controls, which give you sliders for each eye, the top and bottom lip, and teeth. You can brighten, sharpen, whiten, adjust eye and lip color, and even add contact lenses (I found this handy in a stock image where the iris texture was lost to noise). New to this version are Makeup Controls. Although these may not always be necessary, they’re totally fun to use, and they might come in handy if a photo shoot lacks a makeup artist or the model’s makeup has worn away. (As with every section/slider, however, too much can look fake.) I especially like the mascara and false eyelashes, which remind me of brushes that Corey Barker created for Scott Kelby’s book, Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop. I’d love to see PortraitPro partner with a cosmetics company for real-world color palettes, but for now it’s great to be able to sample color from your photo or choose from the spectrum. This is powerful retouching software at a very reasonable price. The Studio and Studio Max editions can be used alone or as a Photoshop or Lightroom plug-in, handle RAW files directly, and support different color spaces. PortraitPro 15 Studio Max edition takes what can be a tedious, repetitive task, and gives good results quickly, so you can move on to other work—if you can tear yourself away from playing with it! ■ Company: Anthropics Technology Ltd. Price: $239.90 Web: www.portraitprofessional.com Rating: ◆◆◆◆◆ Hot: Myriad features make retouching fast and enjoyable Not: Hair-coloring features and presets could be improved
› › GET THE SCOOP ON THE LATEST GEAR X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Video Four Reference Color Targets in a Clamshell Review by Erik Vlietinck In December, X-Rite released its ColorChecker Video range of products, including the ColorChecker Passport Video, which uses a clamshell design with four targets rolled into one. It integrates with Color Finale, a professional color grading plug-in for Final Cut Pro X by Denver Riddle. The ColorChecker Passport Video has a white balance target, a 40 IRE midtone gray patch, a color target, and a focus target. The color target has six chips specifically designed to align with the color axis on a vectorscope. The workflow is simple. Before you start your actual take or shot, you place the ColorChecker for a couple of seconds somewhere in the frame facing the camera, making sure the reflective black patch doesn’t reflect into the lens. When everything’s been done correctly, you can shoot your clip as usual. In postproduction you can now correct colors using the card as a reference tool. The card makes the correction process a lot easier because you’re dealing with primary colors. The whole process becomes really efficient when it’s integrated with your video editor, such as with the Color Finale plugin for Final Cut Pro X. In color grading apps, such as Adobe’s SpeedGrade, you miss out on this user-friendly integration. Even then, it’s easier to get colors right using the target and the software’s vectorscope. For DaVinci Resolve (Blackmagic Design), a Color Match feature will soon integrate with the ColorChecker, while other apps will integrate the ColorChecker in their correction workflow as well. The white balance and 40 IRE patches allow you to improve the color preview on your camera’s display so your histograms are more reliable. The focus target helps with edge focusing; however, users of cheaper lenses will benefit less with this target than others because of moiré problems. The company also offers a large ColorChecker Video for studio work. ■ Company: X-Rite, Inc. Price: $149 Web: http://xritephoto.com/video-targets Rating: ◆◆◆◆◆ Hot: Form factor; lightweight; 4-in-1 Not: Macphun’s Aurora HDR Pro Advanced Color Control and Color Toning Review by Steve Baczewski Early HDR software gave photographers a process to combine bracketed exposures of a scene and maximize the dynamic range otherwise too wide to be captured by a single exposure. Sadly, the results were often garish, lacking subtlety, and left a vacuum for a more photorealistic look. A collaborative effort between Macphun and HDR maven Trey Ratcliff, Aurora HDR Pro has arguably the most powerful comprehensive toolset on the market, providing users with a creative license to roam from the otherworldly to photorealistic. This Mac-only Pro version works as a standalone and as a plug-in for Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and Elements. Much of the Aurora interface will look familiar. The slider names are appropriately descriptive; however, some sliders have levels of complexity with fine distinctions, so I’d suggest users might benefit by reading the manual and watching website video tutorials, including an hour-long video with Trey Ratcliff. Aurora Pro supports all the popular proprietary RAW formats, and you can drag-and-drop files on Aurora’s splash screen or export them from your image editor. Initial processing includes options for ghost reduction, alignment, and chromatic aberration. Five 42-megapixel Sony RAW files took two minutes to process. There are 38 wide-ranging presets for use as a point of departure, but Aurora’s power is in its vast toolset. Edits can be done globally or selectively. Key features include luminosity masks, advanced tone mapping, a sophisticated layers section, blend modes, masking, brushes, and image detail enhancement. A histogram tracks your every move. Although I found using the split screen before-and-after mode very practical, I hope the next version of this software will include a history feature or an option to save snapshots for versions worth further exploration. While you can dial it way up stylistically, Aurora HDR Pro is great with creating a balanced, natural HDR look. If you create HDR images, Aurora Pro is well worth looking into. ■ Company: Macphun Software Price: $99 Web: www.macphun.com Rating: ◆◆◆◆ Hot: Multiple export options including social media Not: No history or snapshot feature › › kelbyone.com 123
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THE ADOBE ® PHOTOSHOP ® “HOW-T0
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› › KELBYONE.COM Lightroom Maga
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The official publication of KelbyOn
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KELBYONE PHOTO & DESIGN CONTEST >>
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