I recently did a set of studio sessions for about a dozen families. Most of my work is with young children, but a few of these families had teenagers with the typical skin problems that brings. Because of the volume of pictures I had to process, I decided to check out Portrait Professional to see if it would help.
I have to say that I was rather skeptical. Their ads look cheesy. Most of the pictures I've seen from fans are processed beyond my preference and style. I really didn't have high expectations, but I also didn't relish the choice of presenting my clients with lots of pictures with bad skin and the promise that I'd retouch the ones they wanted or spending an entire weekend processing the same few faces in Photoshop.
I tried a trial version of the software. Fortunately, their trial version is watermark based (it puts an ugly watermark on your pictures) rather than time based because I had installed the trial before and never spent enough time with it to really see if I liked it. Because it was watermark based, I was able to install a new trial without any hassles.
It took me a couple of passes to get the settings to my liking. By default, it makes everyone's skin look, well, not like skin. It took me about 15 minutes to tweak it so that I liked the output from a picture. Once I had that done, I was able to crank through my pictures at a rate of about 2/minute. It has a "batch" mode, but that just means that it auto-loads the next picture.
For each picture, you have to specify whether it is male or female. Then you have to identify the outer edges of the eyes and the tip of the nose. Then you can either let it rip based on that small amount of info or you can fine tune the position and shape of the eyes, lips, nose, and facial edges. For quick proofs, you can usually get away without the fine tuning on most pictures. For actual prints, it's pretty important to take the extra steps.
It does a pretty good job overall. It was great for eliminating acne. It's still far from perfect. It lets you touch up a lot of stuff, but it has odd omissions like no control over teeth whitening and brightening, which is pretty key to most photos. I was also never able to get the eyes quite the way I wanted them. They were always a little lacking in contrast, having lost most of the darker tones outside of the pupil itself.
It definitely appears to like clean, hi-res images. The shots I took at f/8 to f/11 worked much better than those taken at f/2.8. I turned the slider for smoothing pores all the way down. Having that light skin texture helped preserve the illusion that the photo wasn't heavily retouched. The pores were much less obvious in my wide open shots, so that trick didn't work and, consequently, it was harder to avoid that overly smooth processed look.
So is it worth it? That depends. If you don't take many portraits, obviously not. If you do, it is worth it if you have to process high volumes or if you don't know or don't care to know how to do good touch up in Photoshop. It'll do 80% of the job for you with almost no effort.
I wish I had some before and after examples to show you. I don't have permission for any of the teens I shot for something like that and I'd hate to have them stumble on their photos as an example of the need for retouching. My boys haven't quite reached that phase yet. Maybe I'll do a self portrait later so you can see how it works on the tired and worn phase of a middle age man aged beyond his years. Or if anyone has a high res image they want demo'd, I'd be happy to oblige.
