articles/Postproduction/portraitpro10-page2
by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2011
Above Excellent though Portrait Professional is we are not advocating that you abandon your Photoshop skills. In this image, taken from the Carrie Beene book reviewed this issue, we have retouched Vania with Portrait Professional but note that the crease in the background, some detector blemishes and a few stray hairs on the eyebrows would all need attention from Photoshop. Also the highly polished effects such as individual eye-lash treatment, rucks in the dress and so on would all need Photoshop.
The effect is subtle, the subject is instantly recognisable, looking perhaps as though they have been professionally and skilfully made up. Most professionals' experience with using the software is that the sitter does not recognise what has been done but simply responds with a comment such as 'that's a nice picture of me, I'll buy one!' This is why the software is a money spinner, you should sell more portraits, make your sitters happier and, importantly, get additional business from the friends who they shows off their new wall portrait to (this does happen, one PP user had golf-club lady captains phoning him and saying, 'will you make my portrait like the one you took of so and so (another club captain)'.
In terms of the new features of version 10, Portrait Professional is getting wiser as it grows older. The software is continuously upgraded with a larger database of faces, it is now more stable when 3/4 views are presented; the latest version has also been trained to look at children. Previously PP would enhance a child portrait in an inappropriate, 'adult way'. The new check-box for a child's face gets around this issue and references children's faces.
The skin adjustments for blemishes have been upgraded with the introduction of the patented Clearskin technology. This does a better job of grafting real skin textures when repairing shiny areas for example. It is difficult to put any numbers on the improvements but we formed the distinct impression that version 10 was doing a better, more subtle job than before. Even so you should not let your Photoshop skills go altogether, in one example we found that the tips of the teeth were overwhitenened and needed a little bit of cloning.
A 'skin only' mode has been implemented in version 10 following requests from the user base. When the 'face sculpting' is switched off, only the skin and blemish correction is employed, leaving the facial features untouched.
In order to look at the program in more detail we took an image of a very pretty girl (from the Carrie Beene DVD - see Books this issue) along with an image of a wedding couple. The wedding couple were friends - we have found that with people you know quite well, you are more disturbed by the enhancements if they are a little heavy handed and you need to apply slightly less in the way of changes.
Although Carrie Beene's model is quite stunning, the subtle enhancements made by Portrait Professional were just that, subtle enhancements. We also employed the hair smoothing which gave a final gloss to the shot. On this 4,000x6,000 pixel image (Canon 1Ds MkII) the enhancement took about 20 seconds to process, using the 64-bit version of the software in 64-bit Windows 7, which is plenty quick enough considering the amount of work the program has just saved you.
On completion the files may be saved as tiffs or jpeg and a 'pp' tag is added automatically to indicate that this is the polished version, not the original. We noted that the default setting is for a compressed tiff, which should be avoided if your files are being sent for press use as this can stall many RIPs.
For our final test we took a wedding shot. The couple were not youngsters but Portrait Professional produced a sympathetic enhancement, which retained the essential character of the faces but just cleaned up a few signs of age and stress. The changes were important but not really detectable (never show your clients 'before and afters'!) just what good retouching should be like. You should not abandon your Photoshop skills and allow PP to take over completely, you need to keep a weather eye on the finished images and a bit of cloning here and there is sometimes beneficial for the final polish of a retouch. You may recall that Jane Conner-ziser had some wise words on the subject in her opening column of the last issue and you should still consider books such as Carrie Beene's which is reviewed in this issue. In the wedding shot described above, for example, the teeth were slightly over-whitened just on the tips and required a little bit of toning down as the flaw was evident even at A4 print size.
Overall then, if you do not own Portrait Professional and you are operating in the social sector, then you should seriously consider buying it, it is impossible to believe that you would not recoup your outlay in a short time. If you are a version 9 owner then the upgrade is well worthwhile as the program is now 64-bit compatible and does seem to have studied well under the tuition of the programmers; it's getting better all the time as the song goes!
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