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A: My passion and enthusiasm for Adobe Photoshop often blinds me to the reality of a learning curve for most photographers. As artists, we all appreciate the skill and painting abilities necessary to perfect images in Photoshop or Lightroom, but there are other software options, namely Portrait Professional.
By Kim Herrera
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop
The Photoshop/Lightroom learning curve is reality when it comes to money, and as we all know all too well, time is money. I have been researching a solution for this very problem for some portrait photographer clients of mine, and have found a third party software for under $100 with free upgrades, support and a full money back satisfaction guarantee that handles portrait retouching at a basic and decent level.
I will be the first to tell you that it is no substitute for my beloved Photoshop. However, I believe it very much has its place in today’s portrait market; a market where Photoshop artistry might be overkill based on the price of the session and prints, as well as the time it takes a photographer to retouch a portrait properly and cover all the basics.
The software is called Portrait Professional. It’s a photo editing software that requires you to simply identify your image and the key points, called Point Placing. This initial mark-up step identifies the eyes, the eyebrows, nose lips and facial edges…
Simple instructions guide you through your first Portrait Professional demo.
Identify the key features in the mark-up stage.
I found this software to be user friendly, and it actually accomplishes airbrushing techniques with slider bar menus! Yes, slider bars. It addresses pores, complexion, teeth, lips, and eyes… an unbelievable amount of retouching, all the while instructing you that precision is not necessary. You need only to come close. Observe the many presets available and controls underneath.
The overall control slider menu in Portrait Professional.
Each submenu slider control has even more detailed options.
More in-depth control submenus.
Portrait Professional has a variety of options available, including skin smoothing, spot reduction, and face shaping. It prefers 16-bit RAW TIFF files for maximum enhancement. It handles processed 8-bit files fine. There is a bit more that it has to offer, but since I'm not in sales I think I'll let you explore. You can try a free demo for Mac or PC at the website.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed in the minimal attention paid to the print process. The word Print does not even show in the demo glossary! The only mention I found of printing was under the File command. If you click Print, your regular print dialog menu will come up. I still need to do further testing, so for the time being I print from Photoshop.
I will leave you with these before-and-after samples using Portrait Professional and Photoshop. I spent eight minutes in Portrait Professional to get these results, and it was my first experience using it:
Original RAW capture file.
Portrait Professional results in about eight minutes.
Traditional results in Photoshop after about 40 minutes of re-touching.
Note: Photoshop Sample effects were achieved using methods previously discussed in January's InFocus eNewsletter.
Kim Herrera, Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop, is the color management expert for Logan Photography at Studio Exchange, Santa Ana, Calif., and runs KCH Digital, a digital artistry, education, and consultancy firm.