Portrait Professional 9 Studio Pro Edition
Summary
This is where I do believe that a picture is worth 5000 words, the sample image below was captured at one of my studio nights at the club with a relatively modest light setup and a 20 year old 50mm prime lens. No other pre or post processing was applied except for PP9 at the default installed settings, this image took me no more than 6 minutes, from file upload to save and print.
Today I want to take you through Portrait Professional 9 studio edition. Again I think it nice to tackle it for those out there that do not know that there are dedicated software packages for you, the Portrait Professional, and the up and coming pro or maybe a home hobbyist that needs a hand in turning out consistent, quality work in minutes, not hours!
Using Portrait Professional 9
The human face is probably one of the most problematic forms to tackle in any photo editing software; even subtle changes in one of hundreds of areas can render a given image somehow changed, usually in not a nice way. There have been countless studies over the years into the human mind to establish something we already know. Minuscule changes to a person’s facial features in, relative eye position, shape, colour, left to right feature balance has a huge impact on whether we find that person attractive or downright “not my type” what we thought was a personal thing turns out to be largely a mathematical formula, and being numbers, computers can step in and take a lot of the guess work out of enhancing any given image in minutes not hours. This is where Anthropics Technologies, developer of Portrait Professional stepped up to the plate with a revolution in software application for portrait photography, and it is truly amazing!
When I said default settings, my example image is what you can expect to get after following the simple steps that Portrait Professional 9 walks you through, which to be honest is childs play, literally. As you progress and become more competent, these features can be easily turned on or off at will in the tool menu. I look at desktop work areas all day long, it’s rare to find one that is designed exceptionally well in the default mode that just works from the onset like Portrait Professional 9.
Once you are stepped through shifting the “point and click” dots on the locations requested, left eye, right eye, point of nose etc... You will then be given a zoomed in image of say the left eye. Be accurate here, drag and shifting these dots not only change the position but will change the shape of the line to a infinite selection of shapes, be patient and experiment, I found the best results obtained with the line bordering the pink of the eye lid and the whites of the eye. Once the eyes are done the mouth is next, again leave the tutorial prompts on as these can give you some gems all along the way. The mouth prompts will even give you a choice of mouth open or closed, once you finish each section just hit the space bar, if you feel a change is needed simply hit the back button to return to the preceding window, total control in your desktop environment. At the end of this first section when enough information has been gathered the program will run with the ball.
At the next window you are given a before and after side by side default dual image of your work, at this stage you will be impressed with many things, the quality of the processed image being the most prevalent. It used to take me hours to get to here, and with so much time already spent I would be happy to stop here, not any more. The next ten minutes can get you to the next level of true image quality that you see on magazine covers or a perfect gallery image to grace any wall.
Slider control is becoming more and more the norm in editing software mainly for two reasons, one it’s simple with infinite possibilities between on and off, and two it works! PP9 makes extensive use of sliders in a vertical menu format to the left of the dual image on screen. Headed up as “Portrait improving sliders” You may decide now to throttle back the image a little closer to the as-shot image or go on and see how you can further enhance the PP9 default image. Each section has a master slider which when adjusted will move all sub sliders in that section to varying preset values, for even more control, hit the arrow key in the top left in each sub section for even more fields and sliders. The options available with all tools extended is exciting to say the least because by this time you have a understanding of just how easy or reversible it all is. You can change for instance eye shape, colour, whiten eyes, and even sharpen eyes individually. Change lip makeup, hue, colour sheen, remove pores, the list is long with well over 100 sliders to play with if you choose to look at all of them. Some of the extraordinary features I will touch upon as these results are accomplished with single sliders in seconds; these take me hours in Photoshop or Lightroom.
Master fade: head, jaws, nose, neck … Extending a neck can be tricky at worst and takes some knowhow to achieve good results at best, done properly can take 20lbs off a model visually, PP9 does it in seconds in real time on the screen, Sometimes it’s the photographer with the wrong angel or lens making the nose larger than it should be, again seconds with a slider. Tan adjustment complete with separate saturate and darken sliders. For those of you familiar with focus mask PP9 has this feature for “show skin area” allowing you to brush in extended neck lines or even full bodies. There’s also one of the most automated hair tidying functions I have ever used and well worth the purchase for this feature alone, again a coloured hair mask can be used for any hair you missed out on, the results are better than I have ever achieved using several other editing packages and again several sliders allowing you complete control over hair smoothing, shadows, highlights and shine. The eye control section is fantastic with some of the biggest bang for buck changes you can make to a portrait lies in this section, total control over shape, sharpening, lighten/darken iris, colour; you can even add preset reflections to the eyes with great effect. Another big and unexpected feature, save your own tried and tested presets for future work and even apply these to multiple images through, yes batch processing!
This software is for a lack of better words “an exception”, take the time and download a free 30 day fully functioning trial and sample this amazing software for yourself, if you don’t agree that the first image you turn out with PP9 is not the best image you have ever done in less than 20 minutes, you’re still asleep.
Conclusion
Portrait professional 9 is said to be the market leader in “dedicated” portraiture manipulation software, in my books it’s the only one! With all these features in one bundle I know of no other software that comes remotely close in raw speed and tested ability. Its fast on even a moderate spec laptop, has been designed to Fit beautifully on a 16:9 screen although scales well on a standard laptop screen, can be installed as a plug-in in Photoshop, 8 or 16 bit support, supports a total of 7 colour spaces including adobe RGB and apple RGB, RAW support as well in this studio pro version, If you’re a dedicated portrait shooter professional or amateur this software is as important as the lens on your camera. Because of the nature of my work even my 4 year old girl know what a cordless mouse is, sitting on my lap with a picture of mummy on the screen she was moving sliders in no time at all to good effect, she can’t even read but soon learnt by sight how to change, quite well I might add, the image. I asked her what she was doing and her reply with knitted eye brows was “making mummy more beautiful”… The A3 now sits on her bedroom wall; if a four year old in 5 minutes can do it… now that’s impressive
If any software ever deserved the camera heaven Gold award it’s this one!
“Camera Heaven Double Gold Award”
“Portrait professional 9 is said to be the market leader in “dedicated” portraiture manipulation software, in my books it’s the only one!
