› ›photoshop user› february 2016122
Product Reviews
Make Portrait Retouching Easy and Even Fun!
Review by Jessica MaldonadoAn experienced Photoshop user can take hours of meticulous atten-
tion 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 dead-
line? 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 por-
traits 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 impres-
sively 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 Pre-
sets, including a few that add makeup (new this version). No pre-
set 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 cus-
tom 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 Photo-
shop’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 aneven 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 mod-
el’s makeup has worn away. (As with every section/slider, how-
ever, 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 edi-
tion 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! ■PortraitPro 15
Studio Max EditionCompany: Anthropics Technology Ltd. Price: $239.90
Web: http://www.portraitprofessional.com Rating: ◆◆◆◆◆
Hot: Myriad features make retouching fast and enjoyable
Not: Hair-coloring features and presets could be improvedBeforeAfter with Makeup