I have had several shoots this year but nothing to really blog about. Just a few paid jobs small product shoots or business portraits etc. Although I have several ideas I’m working on in the next few weeks that should be something different, but last week Gloria was in the studio for a shoot.

I didn’t use a lot of new light set ups, but just had fun with the shoot and wanted to try putting the raw files through Portrait Professional 11…

What Can It Do?

• Fix skin blemishes such as spots or pimples
• Reduce and/or remove wrinkles
• Remove grease, sweat or shine from the skin
• Subtly reshape all or any aspect of the face
• Enhance the eye and mouth shape color and sharpness
• Smooth, recolor and thicken the subject’s hair
• Adjust the lighting on the face

Portrait Professional 11

With Adobe wanting people only to use a subscription based services I have started to look for alternatives and shear my experience with them. First off I use 90% Lightroom for my work stuff but there are some things that Lightroom can to that Photoshop can e.g. layers etc. Portrait Professional is by no means a Photoshop replacement, in fact I used it entirely as a Lightroom plug in.

Portrait Professional in Lightroom.

Portrait Professional Studio is very user friendly and easy to use. This program utilizes sliders to control the adjustments you make to your portraits and you can save your preferred settings for future use. With this photo retouching software, you can quickly smooth skin, enhance eyes and sculpt facial features. With this software, you have complete control over facial structure, coloring and feature size. It makes automatic adjustments for you and can also be used as a plugin for Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom. In my opinion  the default settings are set high, giving plastic overdone results until you reset them.

Automatic face recognition that just wasn’t 100%

Either as a plug in or stand alone program the process is simple to use. Once the image is imported to Portrait Professional it will try to automatically recognize any faces in the image. If you don’t like the automatically selection or it is incorrect you can easily set all the points yourself .

After manually setting all the required points 

One you have selected the face and chosen the gender it will automatically render a new touch up. But like I said earlier the results can be very over the top so I found clicking on “reset to original image” and manually using the sliders gave me nor natural touch ups. Once you are happy with your results simply click “Return from Plugin”  and it will re export your copied file back to Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom with your adjustments.

If you hold your mouse over the image below you will get a before and after using nothing but the automatic settings from 1 file in lightroom .

Before and After

As for the lighting I used several different setup during the shoot. The first one was A large Octobox on a Bowens Gemini 400 monoblock from that you can see in the first capture below  slightly high and right shot with an 85mm Zeiss, f/4, iso 100, 1/125th

Second was a 80×80 softbox on a Bowens Gemini 400 camera right any anoter on a Bowens Gemini 400 with a re gel on the other side of the studio.  Minolta 100mm Macro, f/7.1 ISO 100 1/80th

The 3rd set up was clam shell lighting with 2 Bowens Gemini 400 and shotboxes Positioned above and blow my camera. Minolta 100mm Macro, f/7.1 ISO 100 1/80th

Conclusion

It really isn’t replacement for Photoshop but dose add a lot of power to Lightroom when it comes to portrait post production, but you will have to pay €80 to get all the features due to my raw file sizes and 64bit operating system the only real choice for me to use would be the studio 64 edition but the normal studio edition my be sufficient for most people.

You can download a demo version here http://www.portraitprofessional.com/download/

Versions
Portrait Professional 11 is available as a fast stand-alone application and also as a plug-in that integrates with Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop Elements. You get both with the Studio and Studio 64 versions. All three versions are compared in the table below, which also shows the discounted pricing that was available when this review was written.