Portrait Professional v8 Review | |
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We clicked with:
Cheap and easy facial enhancement
Doesn't go all 'freakshow' unless you force it
Quicker than Photoshop
No big learning curve
Shots in the dark:
Not as thorough as Photoshop
Manual control not powerful
No applications outside portraits
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There's nothing wrong with being a one-trick pony, if it's a really good trick. That's the ethos behind Portrait Professional. This piece of software is designed for one use, and one use alone... to make us look better.
The Program
Portrait Professional works by having you map a series of key facial co-ordinates on the portrait you have taken. There's a handy guide, making the process very intuitive. This is almost like creating a 3D wireframe model of the face beneath the photo itself. Fortunately, although Portrait Professional v8 allows you to change the shape of the face, you can't go too extreme, unless you set the facial waypoints to 'Klingon' - for extreme facial modelling, you still need Photoshop's Warp tool. Whatever you use, remember; there's a thin line between 'cute-looking pixie effect' and 'freakish cartoon elf'
Remember join the dots? That's how easy mapping faces can be
The facial adjustment of Portrait Professional is a lot smarter than you might first imagine. It's built on an algorithm of biometrics, so rather than just randomly warping flesh into and out of the 'right' places on a photograph; Portrait Professional automatically changes the shape of the face to bring it more in line with an archetypal human face. Not just one human face, either; there are several automatically adjusted options that shape the face and skin tone, and these differ for men and women. This is not a new idea (in fact, it dates back to Plato's dialogues), but the idea of shaping the 'real' face on the 'perfect form' of a face has been the stuff of sci-fi, plastic surgery or hours of expensive photo retouching… until now.
Once the face is mapped, Portrait Professional makes basic retouching a doddle
In addition to the facial resculpting, Portrait Professional offers other beauty adjustments; there's a series of sliders that can smooth skin, and remove spots and blemishes. This is automated, but there's also a brush tool for manual removal of wrinkles and the like. You can even dial in different eye and skin colour, thicken or soften hair, lighten teeth, thicken or slim down lips… the works. The latest Portrait Professional v8 adds more adjustment to eyes and hair, a better interface and the chance to use the program on Macs.
Picture Quality
Portrait Professional v8 works. It does pretty much all it says it does, and does it with the minimum of fuss and bother. It's very intuitive; the opening page includes several tutorial faces (shown here) and the controls are easy to understand. You will be de-mingering your friends and family in seconds. There's some limited degree of manual control, but most of the adjustment is powered by the program, you get to play with sliders. There is also some level of localised spot control, but down-to-the-pixel correction is beyond Portrait Professional's ken. Where the lack of manual override falls down is dealing with faces that would require more work in Photoshop than usual. Which is a polite way of saying if your subject has a face like the south side of a north bound camel, Portrait Professional does not give you the manual override to help matters.
Override is possible, but the process is still automated... and occasionally OTT
There is nothing that Portrait Professional v8 does to an image that cannot be done by someone armed with a copy of Photoshop and a full set of retouching skills. If you have the time, the inclination and the ability, Photoshop can deliver an even more finessed fizzog than Portrait Professional could muster. However, many photographers may have the front-end smarts to take a good portrait but lack the post-processing skills to turn someone with a face like a sack of spuds into the next Halle Berry - Portrait Professional gives them a chip in the big retouching game.
Conclusion
Most of us don't want to spend years perfecting retouching skills and then hours to make every image look better. We want the ten-second fix, and that's where Portrait Professional v8 wins out. It's cheap, easy to learn and for most faces it does its magic with a sublime and deft hand. And that makes it money well spent.
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| Discuss this article, 1 of 4 messages, read more: |  Tony Polichroniadis | |
| Posted: 15/09/08 09:59:54 54 | | The screenshots in the review of Portrait Professional 8 are of an old version: Portrait Professional 6. |
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