Portrait Professional

Portrait Professional Studio 9 is nothing short of amazing!

When reviewing or testing software, I rarely find an application lacking or nearly lacking any flaws. This is one of those rare finds. Portrait Professional’s website is loaded with before/after pictures and long lists of features, and honestly, I was skeptical that a program would be able to make such significant changes with little human interaction.

Seeing is believing. I played around with Portrait Professional on some sample photos and some that I took myself. Every single time, I got a result that was stunning in just minutes. The process itself is simple.
1. Open up a picture.
2. Choose points on the face, as guided by the software, such as, the outer corners of the eyes, the nose tip, and the mouth corners.
3. Adjust the lines connecting the points on the face.

That process, under a minute, after practice with a few photos, produces a great end-result. Now your artistic touch comes into use. You have a bunch of sliders to play with that change lighting, skin smoothness, eye brightening, smile enhancements, and tens of other features. You can even add reflections in someone’s eyes (catch-lights), like the beach or just a dot, though I found it better to just sharpen the eyes.

Do note that messing with the sliders requires an artistic eye. I can see how someone will easily overdo one effect or not use another one when it should be used. It’s very easy to make a photo look over-airbrushed in Portrait Professional and that should be avoided at all costs. The initial touch up done automatically by the application will look great, won’t look overdone, but it probably won’t be your end result. In my tests, I always made some changes, which is easy with sliders and the touch up brush.

If there is an action you frequently do in your photos, such as adding a certain amount of lighting and distorting the width of the skin, you can make a saved slider out of that. Next time you want to touch up a photo, just select the save slider, and it will recreate those actions. On that note, you can also do batch editing in the studio version, which lets you quickly touch up pictures on a mass scale.

Without a doubt, the touch ups I do using Portrait Professional come out better and faster than the ones I have done with Photoshop. I almost wish this application had more flaws, so that this review wouldn’t seem like a blatant advertisement.

Portrait Professional is normally $99.95, but on sale for $69.95.
Portrait Professional Studio is normally $149.95, but on sale for $99.95.
However, I’ve never seen the “normal” price, it seems to always be the sale price.

There’s a FREE trial that doesn’t let you save photos. Get it here.