Everybody nowadays knows of Photoshop and when it comes to photographing portraits, your sitter will probably be aware of how pictures can be enhanced using Photoshop. There is no doubt about it, portraits can be extensively retouched in Photoshop, but this is a time consuming process and takes considerable skill which in itself has a long learning curve. There is a much easier way.
Portrait Professional is a sophisticated application/software/program, whatever you like to call it, that can automatically retouch faces. I remember a few years ago when I first became aware of it, I rather poo-pooed the idea. How can software be capable of such a complex task? I doubted if the results would be as good as the long way round in Photoshop, especially as I specialised in beauty shots which were labouriously retouched by yours truly, during painstaking hours, to give a very professional result. However, a year or so later, I was doing some unpaid work that didn’t warrant hours in Photoshop, so decided to give it a try. Boy, was I surprised. Not only was this as easy as pie, the results were amazing! They were at least as good as Photoshop if not better, and instead of spending about three hours per photo, a picture could be retouched in 3 minutes or under!
On the left is a picture before it was edited in Portrait Professional. Click the picture to enlarge it and compare the ‘Before and After’. The ‘After’ was created completely automatically at the default settings. It took less than a minute to produce.
Portrait Professional is so easy to use. If you want to delve deeper into the enhancements possible, there are many slider controls enabling you to customise the exact effect you want and to focus on individual aspects such as eyes, mouth, skin etc. It really is an amazingly powerful program that can cut your portrait retouching time to a fraction of what it was in Photoshop or other software.
Your sitters will be delighted. This is the ultimate flatterer!
To check out Portrait Professional, use the links above. You can download a 30 day trial from here.
