New Software

A while ago a friend of mine demonstrated a product named Portrait Professional. He was doing a lot of portrait work at the time and was really impressed with its capabilities. He was running his version on his Mac and I am a PC Windows based user. I did eventually download the trial version of Portrait Professional and played with a bit. I was doing some of the things is does in Adobe Photoshop so I placed it on the back burner for a bit.

I eventually got a promotional e-mail offering a discounted price for Portrait Professional 9 with a free upgrade to Portrait Professional 10 when it became available. Portrait Professional 10 is now released and today I finally got around to loading it on my PC. Naturally, one needs to test their newly installed software, so I selected a photo of a model I had photographed more than a year ago to test with.

I think you would agree the photo of her looked pretty good since she is a very lovely young lady. She has makeup on, so any minor imperfections would certainly have been taken care of. Her photo does not need much improvement but perhaps a subtle amount of correction could enhance the image, so I loaded it into Portrait Professional 10 to see what it would render.

Portrait Professional 10 and previous versions I have seen of it give a walking guide of selecting reference points for the eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, hairline and face contour. The user has the option of fine tuning the contours of the selected items. I found that very slight minor corrections are required after Portrait Professional 10 has completed its selection process. When you are satisfied with the selections, Portrait Professional 10 will render a suggested corrected image.

Since all beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Portrait Professional 10 does allow for correction of any and all photo parameters by the end user. There are sliders for every aspect which allows the used to visually see the effect as the sliders are moved. Using the software is easy and very intuitive in its use. I have used it without reading a manual or help screen. The results are stunning even for a photo requiring a subtle correction.

I admit, I have not used this product extensively to date, but I do anticipate using it much more in the future. So I am very pleased with the purchase and results achieved in using Portrait Professional 10. However, one needs to test for their self use and the best way to do that is first play with the free trial version that is available for either the Windows based PC or the Mac. One caveat to using the trial version is while you can work on any photo you wish it will have a watermark placed on it. So, the trial version is only suitable for product evaluation and not to render adjusted photos without first buying the product.