Friday , March 29 2024
Do you want a perfect portrait retouching program that's fast and easy?

Software Review: onOne Perfect Portrait From onOne Software

Perfect Portrait is the latest creation from onOne Software that gives you the ability to quickly and easily retouch portraits through the automation of many time consuming tasks. It automatically finds facial features in your images and through the latest techniques in retouching, enhances your image.

Perfect Portrait comes as part of the onOne Plug-In Suite 6 or can be purchased separately. It is a completely new product that offers the latest innovations in portrait retouching for photographers. You can improve skin texture and color, remove blemishes and enhance features like eyes, lips, and teeth. It works directly with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and Apple Aperture. It can even run as a standalone application as well.

The way this works is when you have a photo with a face or two in it that you want to adjust – say a portrait as shown below – you just have to open it in Perfect Portrait. In this case, I opened from within Adobe Lightroom, but it could have been done just as easily from Photoshop or Aperture.

Once it loads, it is going to automatically make its own best guess on the initial processing. This initial look really wasn’t too bad, but it is still not perfect. The primary areas that were not correct had to do with the masking of the face and hair.

So what I did was to go to the selection mask to see what it had masked off and what it had not for the skin portion. I switched on the overlay mask and could see that the areas that were in red were highlighted and would not be touched and the other parts would.

In my initial case some of the hair was not highlighted and some of the areas around the eyes and mouth were not done the best they could be. So using the masking brush, I made the adjustments myself. Once that was done I could then use the adjustment sliders to change the amount of coverage I wanted to use for blemishes, smoothing of the skin, shine, shadows, and texture.

Next I did the same for the eyes. For these I adjusted the masking as well, and I was able to make corrections for strength, whitening, and clarity. From there, I worked on the masking of the mouth and then adjusted the strength, whitening, and vibrancy of the mouth. I had already gotten the skin tone where I wanted it within Lightroom, so I did not make any SkinTune adjustments, but could have adjusted for ethnicity, strength, warmth, and color shift as well.

With those adjustments, I was done. I applied the changes and it took me back to Lightroom. Had I had a series of shots from a photo shoot, I could have saved these changes as a preset and batch processed the shoot and either been done, or gone on to make even fewer tweaks to the remaining images.

So what is new with Perfect Portrait?

• Automatic face detection – essentially takes your photo, determines the faces that are in there, and makes the global masking and skin adjustments such as blemishes and smoothing automatically. It also makes the adjustment for the skin tone as well

• Automatic feature detection – next, finds the eyes and mouth, masks them, and makes the automatic adjustments.

• Retouch Brush – gives you the ability to manually adjust the areas of the image to remove acne, stray hairs, or other large blemishes.

• Skin blemish removal and smoothing takes a manual process that you used to have to do in a photo editing program, and automates it, making your job much simpler.

• SkinTune Color Correction – helps you achieve accurate and natural skin color automatically. This color correction technology adjusts color based on the skin color and ethnicity of each face in the image.

Perfect Portrait is really a simple program but the amount of time that it can save you is just amazing. It is extremely easy to use and completely modifiable so that I can’t see why it wouldn’t be used anytime there is a face in an image. The changes that you are able to make really take just minutes and the results are phenomenal.

Now the fact that it comes as part of the Perfect Photo Suite 6 is just the icing on the cake. If you want to make quick work of your portrait retouching, then I highly recommend Perfect Portrait from onOne Software.

About T. Michael Testi

Photographer, writer, software engineer, educator, and maker of fine images.

Check Also

Software Review: Perfect Photo Suite 9 from onOne Software

'Perfect Photo Suite 9' enhances all other photo editing products and makes them better.