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Portrait Professional 10 is the latest version of Anthropics’ automated portrait processing software that gives portrait photographers a complete retouching system that provides both an easy workflow and detailed control over portrait processing. It can take you from capture to complete in as little as five easy steps.
Portrait Professional works by targeting specific areas of the face – such as the eyes, mouth, nose, chin, and forehead, and uses those points as reference for making adjustments. From there, its engine – which has been trained with hundreds of examples of beauty portraits, generates a base rendering from which you can refine from. Once you get to this point, you can stop, or you can use a wide variety of controls and sliders to further work your portrait.
How does Portrait Professional work?
The first thing you do is select the picture that you want to edit. This is just a matter of navigating to image and selecting it. This can be one that has been preprocessed, or Portrait Professional has some basic overall image editing capabilities such as exposure, cropping etc. When you open your image you will be presented with a selection of is the face of male or female and you make your selection.
Then you click on the next button and you are presented with the task of first clicking on the left corner of the left eye and then the right corner of the right eye. You are then prompted to click on the tip of the nose, the left corner of the mouth and finally the right corner of the mouth.
Clicking on the next button takes you to step four which will adjust the outlines of the face. Here you will adjust various elements of each eye, the eyebrows, the mouth, the nose, the chin, the forehead, the temple, and the cheeks.
When you click on the next button for step five, Portrait Professional will begin its automatic photographic enhancement where it performs its processing of the image based on internal guidelines. When it is done you will see the original portrait on the left and the new and improved on the right. If you are happy with the results, you can save it and move on or you can refine it with the many controls that Portrait Professional offers.
What’s new in Portrait Professional 10?
• Greatly improved face enhancing functionality has been added due to additional training in human beauty within Portrait Professional’s algorithms. There is also an improved learning algorithm so now it is far better at adding attractiveness to different face types.
• New ClearSkin2 defect elimination and skin regeneration technology is the latest generation of the ClearSkin Skin enhancing technology. As opposed to other skin enhancing software, Portrait Professional incorporates a unique skin defect “find and destroy” function, and it uses a real skin texture to create a far more realistic result and incorporates different textures for different types and ages of skin.
• More and better face shaping and slimming controls gives the user better control over the results with additional and more intelligent sliders. Also there are new sliders to control all aspects of the nose, better eye controls, face shape controls and an “Exaggerate” slider to achieve more dramatic results when it is needed.
• The brushes have been significantly improved as have the “edge finding” skin and hair selection brushes, which automatically find the edges of the skin and hair. This means that accuracy is not required and brushing is very fast and easy.
• Child Mode makes it easy to make appropriate changes to children. Portrait Professional 10 has been trained to understand the enhancements that work with children, and will apply them automatically.
• Enhance Skin Only Mode for when the user does not want to make any changes to the shape of the face being improved.
• Better presets enhancements that can radically speed the face enhancing process, which are designed to make it even easier and faster to make anyone look great in a photo.
• New User Interface is designed to make workflow as streamlined as possible.
What’s new in Portrait Professional Studio 10?
• There is now much improved plug-in support for PhotoShop , Lightroom and Aperture so now Studio 10 works both as stand-alone on Mac and PC, and as a Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom plug-in on both Mac and PC, and now also as a Mac Aperture plug-in. The plug-in installation process has also been greatly simplified making it now very easy to incorporate Portrait Professional into any particular workflow.
• Portrait Professional Studio 10 now has support for virtually all camera RAW files. And because RAW support is implemented as a plug-in, when new cameras and formats come onto the market RAW support is now added within a week or so. Allows absolute color calibration control of images that high end enthusiast and professional users require.
I found Portrait Professional 10 to be incredibly easy to work with and produced extremely high quality results very quickly. It comes with several “Saved Sliders” or presets that you can work with immediately, or as you find settings that you use over and over, you can create your own set of Saved Sliders.
I also like all of the control that Portrait Professional gives you with the sliders in that you can use master sliders to control a whole group such as the eyes, you can control parts of the group such as the pupil of the left eye, or even paint on changes to specific areas. Through this you can control the size of the lips, the color of the eyes, the length of the neck, the texture of the skin, and just about anything else that you need to control.
While anyone can use this program – it really is that easy, it is also too easy to make your subject more glamorous than they really are which may or may not be a bad thing, but thing I like the most is that you are really in charge. If you are looking for a one stop shop for putting the glamour in your portrait photography, then I very highly recommend Portrait Professional 10.
