Using these controls you can substantially change the appearance of a face and you may need to exercise some self-control.
There are presets for women and men, girls and boys.Īnd if that still doesn’t give quite the effect you are searching for, you can go on to set individual parameters one by one, using a set of ‘portrait improving’ sliders which give you a finer level of control over things such as the amount of skin smoothing, how wide the eyes are (are they fully open or partially shut?), how plump the lips are and so on. You can apply a different set of parameters just by picking a different ‘preset’ from a panel – ‘Female Glamorous’, for instance, may make a few more adjustments to the shape and proportions of the face than ‘Female Standard’. Then again, maybe the standard options don’t make your model look glamorous enough. If the image elements were not perfectly identified you can drag the lines to reshape the eyes, chin and so on. But the chances are that you’ll want to make a few adjustments to optimise the image processing first. If the standard enhancement looks OK, that’s it – you can save the new image to disk as JPG, TIFF or PNG file. It applies some standard enhancements to the photo and shows the original in one half of the screen and the enhanced image in the other. Now you click a button to tell the program to treat this face as a male or female, adult or child. Portrait Professional takes a few seconds to identify the face and draw lines over the principal elements – eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, chin. If you happen to be designing a fashion magazine cover and the photographer’s model is looking a little less than perfect, you could either spend a few hours tweaking the photo pixel by pixel in PhotoShop or you could let Portrait Professional automate the process in a fraction of the time.
Of course, this software isn’t limited for use with your home photos. Load up Portrait Professional 15 and within a matter of minutes granny’s wrinkles are smoothed away, Aunty Bertha’s skin is given muted satin-like sheen, Cousin Alfred’s pimples disappear and Sister Annie’s pale flesh is brightened up with a dab of blusher and lipstick. So you’ve taken some photos of the family but when you look at them you see that you’ve accidentally highlighted granny’s wrinkles, Aunty Bertha’s skin is as shiny as a ripe tomato, Cousin Alfred’s still suffering from acne and Sister Annie is still looking pale from the effects of too many sweet sherries the night before.