By David Gewirtz
"Make me beautiful."
Every photographer has heard this at least once. For those of us who've taken many fashion or glamour photos, we've heard it a lot.
Of course, every woman is beautiful in her own way, but our culture tends to value the smoothness and softness of the skin probably more than is truly healthy for a society. Even so, when photographing someone for their best effect, our goal is to capture the best image of reality possible, and then enhance it.
"Total time to retouch after launching Photoshop: six seconds."
Lighting, posing, makeup, hair and all the other physical aspects of photography come into play. But once you've got the image in your camera, a little digital lab work can make all the difference. That's where Photoshop (and the like) are really helpful.
Unfortunately, retouching facial features is more art than science and it's also more tedium than fun. Properly cleaning up a face could take hours of work and a degree of artistic skill that not everyone has. If only there was a better way.
Portraiture
Enter Portraiture, a $169 Photoshop plug-in from Imagenomic. Portraiture can help you get the most out of your portraits with the least amount of work. It's pretty slick.
Take, for example, Figure A.
FIGURE A
Here's the before and after pictures. (click for larger image)
On the left is the woman's image as our clip art library provided us. On the right is the default retouching created by Portraiture.
As you can see, Portraiture removed the most of the freckles, smoothed out the skin, and left the rest of the texture intact. On the default settings, it did not touch her shirt, the quality of her tatoo, or the strands of her hair.
Total time to retouch after launching Photoshop: six seconds.
Of course, there's a bunch of settings you can fiddle with, as shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
Like all good plug-ins, there's a lot you can adjust. (click for larger image)
Like all good plug-ins, there's a lot you can adjust. Also, like all good plug-ins, you can save and recall your settings to create different styles.
In addition, you can use Photoshop actions to record retouching scripts and you can automate them using Photoshop's batch feature. So if you've just come back from a photo shoot with 745 images, you can put them in a folder, load them up, and have Portraiture run through and do a batch cleanup while you're at lunch.
Oopsie, it crashes
We really like Portraiture, but we'd be remiss in our duty to you, the reader, if we didn't report the one problem we had. It crashed. As you can see in Figure C, Portraiture caused Photoshop to crash.
FIGURE C
It crashed. That's not good. (click for larger image)
The crash occurred as we were closing the Portraiture window. Now, to be fair, after a lot of play with Portraiture, it only crashed once. And, it only crashed after we were doing a whole lot of torture testing.
We took the photo of a lizard and decided to see if Portraiture could remove the big bumps on the reptile's skin. We fiddled with masks. We moved the sliders all around. Changed colors, tried previewing a ton of different ways. And, to be fair, Portraiture's meant to clean up human skin, not creepy, crawly creatures.
But, still, it crashed.
Our evaluation and recommendation
At $169, Portraiture's more of a product for a pro or a serious amateur. If you've got a lot of pictures you want to clean up, or if you doubt your own artistic skills touching up photos in just the right way, Portraiture's definitely something you should get.
But what about the crash and what's our final numeric rating? Were Portraiture not to have caused a crash, we would have rated it a solid four out of five. But our published rating guidelines are very specific. To get a rating of four, the product has to be "nearly perfect".
Our rating system also says that a "product that crashes from time to time" gets only a two. Fortunately, we only saw one crash, and never on images the program was designed to handle. It doesn't seem fair to give such a helpful product a rating of two, especially since the "time to time" criteria wasn't true.
So, we're going to split the difference and give Portraiture three beautiful faces out of five. Know that it's really a four-star product without the crash, the company's likely to fix bugs like this and update the product, and we strongly recommend it to you if you have a need for this kind of retouching automation.
We reviewed version 1.0.1 of the product. Check with the company when you're ready to buy and see if they have a later release.
RATING: 3 STARS