Portrait Professional -- useful or cream cheese?

<p>I've been retouching portraits by hand using LightRoom and Photoshop. It's a time consuming process.</p>

<p>I recently learned about Portrait Professional. The web site shows some very nice demos. It looks easy to use and simple enough that it would be really quick. The price is pretty reasonable, too.</p>

<p>My only concern is that all the examples they show look too much like "cream cheese". They look obviously retouched and overprocessed. They have plenty of slider bars, so I'm assuming you can turn the effects down.</p>

<p>Does anyone in our community have real experience with it? Is it really easy to use, quick to learn, and will it really save me a bunch of time? More importantly, is it still useful if you want something that is lightly retouched?</p>

<p>Thanks for all your help!</p>

<p>Allan</p>

<p>Like any tool, you have to control it and not get carried away with what it CAN do. I actually thought that many of their examples were over the top, but if you pull things back, it can save a lot of time. I have used it, sparingly, on commercial portraits but have had to tell friends using it to dial it back, it is very easy to over do it.</p>

<p>Remember that the results you get are due to your control of the tool, it can ruin an image or you could use it without trace, learn how to control it.</p>

<p>It is easy to over use. Just for fun, I shot a 13 year old friend of my daughter. I let the program do a lot of its sculpting but had to dial back the softening of the skin--maybe the most abused I have seen. It turned her into a 25 year old vamp, it was scary. To what end is that useful? Certainly not for general portrait use.</p>

<p>I use the software since version 7 i believe and I am happy with it. You need to learn to know when to stop. You can safe your setting and click on them instantly with each new face if you wish to create your own.<br /><br />Usualy I run just one of the default settings and make sure it is not over done, and there is not to much desortion to earrings and glasses, or lips out of shape. etc.<br /><br />I am mostly concerned with minor adjustments. I want my client to look at her portrait and say "wow that looks great", not like "you photoshopped" me.<br /><br />So far I have not had a single complain, but knowing when to stop matters. I love the program, quikly and easely.</p>

<p>I and my subjects have been very happy with Portrait Professional.<br>

The examples on the website are overcooked, probably to make it obvious what is possible. The product offers lots of granularity in the controls. There are a huge number of image variables that can be individually controlled, with a wide range of settings.</p>

<p>I was skeptical , but now im a believer. It works quite well, in the end its faster than processing it in PS.<br>

the ADs are quite exaggerated, but you can work it as much or little as you want.</p>

<p>I was testing with my grandmas pic, I must have taken 20yrs off.</p>

<p>I've used Portrait Professional for over a year now and I love it. Great time saver. My son never wanted to see it. He kept telling me he does everything in PS till he was in the studio one time and was watching me go through the photos after a shoot. He was impressed and that is a very rare with him. Now I think he wants to get a copy to play with in his studio.</p>

<p>Just started using it recently. Results I'm getting with default settings are not nearly as extreme as what they show in the ads. Much, much easier than trying to do the same thing manually, and it has lots of controls so you should be able to rein it in if you think it's doing too much. At the price, it can't be beat.</p>

<p>when done correctly, its good for mom and dad type of client.. for more serious work the skin look way too retouched and soft,.. and at a low setting, well a gaussian blur + sharpen will give you the same thing more or less (for skin smoothing i mean)</p>

<p>good for photographer that need to make student / young girl / anything with lots of people look good quickly, or too make it look like some magazine cover that have been push too far ; )</p>

<p>The secret in skin retouching is not to blur all the face (with more or less opacity) .. is to remove some small skin *defect* 1-2-3 pimple here and there, and to color balance that skin tone. Then you reduce / remove some red veins in the eyes, clean up a bit of the dry skin on her / his lips and you are good to go for your regular normal client type.. while retaining the texture of the skin 100%. For the normal mom and dad image, 5min could be all you (well, they) need to look good.</p>

<p>The example on there web site are scary, and unfortunatly some user do the same thing.. but it seem that some folks like that *effect* because i see it a lot in many portrait studio ; )</p>

<p>Thought I'd throw in another note. Here's a couple of befores and afters using mostly the default settings:<br>

<a href=" Before</a><br>

<a href=" After</a><br>

<a href=" Before</a><br>

<a href=" After</a></p>

<p> </p>

<p>I use version 10 quite regularly- it's very useful, but the default settings are TOO good. I dial it back a bit on the face sculpting controls and the skin controls- otherwise it looks too artificial to me. The relight function can also trip you up. I disable that about half the time, and turn it way down the other half of the time.<br>

The nice thing is that you can dial it way back and save a preset, and then it's very useful.</p>

 

<p>Useful. I played with the free download and loved it. Easy, fast, well controlled. I love having it as a plugin for Photoshop. For portraits, I use it more than any other tool.</p>

<p>I'm a bit late to the party here but I love Portrait Professional. Being a non-professional it helps me more than it should on my poorly done photographs! It also really helps to make women especially look good in smoothing skin and removing blemishes quickly. I'm in agreement that you have to learn to pull back on the controls. I didn't at first but it's a quick learning process in my opinion. I think it's definitely worth the money in the time it saves once you get your sliders set and saved so you can re-use them. I'll post a few of my before & afters to show you what I mean</p><div></div>

<p>Here is another of my son and his wife.</p><div></div>

<p>I had my camera with me one day at a friend's house when we decided to do some portraits of her daughter. They ended up using them as her senior pictures because they liked them so much.</p><div></div>

<p>Last one - of my friend and her daughter</p><div></div>

<p>Hi Allan........... Also coming in late here, and not having read all the thread...... I love the product and use it quite a bit. They also have their own "member driven" website where you post the before and after and the guru's will help you out..... reciprical like PN.<br>

Yes, tons of sliders... but you use what you need. An easy system to learn and use, yet inexpensive<br>

Regards</p><div></div>

<p>Hi Allan........... Also coming in late here, and not having read all the thread...... I love the product and use it quite a bit. They also have their own "member driven" website where you post the before and after and the guru's will help you out..... reciprical like PN.<br>

Yes, tons of sliders... but you use what you need. An easy system to learn and use, yet inexpensive<br>

Regards</p><div></div>

<p> Be careful with the spot reduction settings. It creates jpg-like compression artifacts, verified with Anthropics that it is a bug.</p>

<p><img src="http://www.jackzucker.com/images/ppblotchies.jpg" alt="" /></p>

 

<p>I use a similar software called Portraiture, a product of Imagenomic. I love it and, as a portrait photographer, find it indispensable. I use it on very modest settings. Sometimes you can not even tell I used it. Very subtle. On the girls (seniors) and young women I use higher settings -- you can tell it's 'airbrushed' and I think it looks great on them. Still not very high. </p>

<p>As David Scott pointed out, Portrait Professional is a good product primarily for the face only. However other 3rd party add-ons can be used to enhance the portrait image such as variations of vignette, adjusting the lighting, soft or hard tones, etc. Inclusive to Portrait Profression, I use the full implementation of NIK software. Lighting, color correction, structure and other factors are easily made without having to make any adjustments in Photoshop. NIK softaware sets up all the masking and one simply merges all the masks before saving. These add-on apps save an enormous amount of time.</p>

<p>I have been using PP since version 10 which was buggy and crashed on me all the time. Version 11 was great and I have recently upgraded to version 12 - so new that the tutorial videos on their website haven't been updated with it yet.<br>

The default settings are way over the top - more so in version 12 than earlier versions. As others have pointed out you can dial it down. Even after dialling it down in general terms I like to go further. There is a "restore brush" which essentially erases the effects applied by the programme. I set the brush strength to 10% and gently add back texture and wrinkles till I think it looks right.</p>

<p>Maybe it looks nice, that's just the description is not processed correctly</p>

<p> http://foto.infan.ru/guest/43048/440288/?95026</p>

<p>http://foto.infan.ru/guest/43048/440289/?95026</p>

<p><a href="http://gfxbest.com/photoshop/frames/">http://gfxbest.com/photoshop/frames/</a></p><div></div>

<p>In the hands of a cheese maker, cream cheese. The ads struck me as over done. </p>

<p>NOT a reputable company. a mediocre product.<br>

<br />i purchased portrait prof 9, upgraded to 10, having spent close to $200 for both versions. the result was always mediocre for headshots and portraits, but i used the result as a layer in photoshop and needed to reduce that layer usually to 12% before it did not look plastic and unreal. <br>

i saw the 12 version and paid to upgrade to it, but once i did their license tokens did not work. after a half dozen emails and support tickets, i was told the website was wrong, and i couldn't upgrade from version 10, even though i had paid for that upgrade from version 9. i would need to pay an additional $20 on top of the $33 upgrade i already made on their website that did NOT work.<br>

ok. i did it. right after i did so i checked the price for simply buying version 12 outright, and it was reduced to $49...to buy outright. this was $4 LESS than they had extorted from me to complete my UPGRADE after being a 5 year customer and already spending close to $200 on their products.<br>

<br />if arcsoft had an edition in mac i would have purchased that and dumped this company. as it is, i have spent so much on their product i want the best version they have to get some use out of it. the fact is, up through version 10 (as i stated) the results are so plastic and artificial looking you must reduce the percent of what you get from them to a very low amount. after all i've spent with them i hope version 12 is somewhat of an improvement, but the company practices, and extortion of higher prices than stated, are disturbing. NO phone support even tho they have a number, all through long time delay emails...this is NOT a product i'd buy if you can go with arcsoft or another reputable software maker. i feel ripped and cheated, and stuck using only a portion of what i paid for. <br>

final update is that i have now paid $53 to upgrade what would have cost me $49 to buy outright, have waited days now to get it with a half dozen emails necessary, and even after making this payment i am still waiting. i'd run from these folks.</p>

<p>I sympathize with Michael Kurtz about the clunkiness of the upgrade process. Upgrading from version 11 to version 12 took numerous emails and an additional payment on top of my first payment (I selected the wrong update for the kind of version 11 I was using - each version has 3 or 4 levels). I didn't feel like they were trying to bilk me out of extra money but the process was painful.<br>

Having said that, when used properly (i.e. dialled way down) it creates very lovely adjustments. If I had to do a full frequency separation edit on every portrait I would just go back to landscapes!</p>