Portrait Professional 9

As other have said used with care it's another tool, if you find your retouching portraits a lot or think theres a market then it's probably worth the money, if your only going use it once or twice then you may well be better off using other methods.
 
Before you buy portrait pro try out Imagenomic Portraiture, it's got the skin smoothing but less face sculpting, it also works on multi faces in an image which PP didn't.
Not sure how the prices stack up though.
 
Portraiture is a lot more subtle and works a lot better than PP in my personal opinion.
 
P Pro does groups shots and body now. skin that is

I have PP9 but have to admit I haven't tried it a mulit person shot yet, how well does it cope?
Edit I just looked into this and it seems you have to do each face individually rather than just ajust them all together.
 
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Another programme is OnOne's Photo Tools.

I have Photo Tools (got it free with CS5) and have tried other programmes trial versions but always seem to go back to doing everything in PS - takes longer but gives me total control when I am doing just a few images that will become large prints
 
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I find it fine for quick and dirty skin smoothing. It works very well if you get bit heavy-handed with the smoothing in PortraitPro9 but use it as a layer in photoshop and lower the opacity to taste. It can look dreadful if used on its own, though, and the face-sculpting is a bit of a gimmic.
 
I havebeen using P Pro since around ver 6 and it has definitely improved. I have the face sculpting turned off and it really can produce some very god results as long as you don't leave it to it's own devices which can give you a Barbie complexion.
 
PSILVERMAN said:
If all you want is skin smoothing then LR3 does an admirable job.

Unless you already have LR you need to compare the costs
 
If all you want is skin smoothing then LR3 does an admirable job.

What are you using, negative sharpening or clarity?
The problem with LR for me is the lack of proper masking, the ajustment brushes make it more fiddly IMHO.
 
I have both and much prefer portraiture, although now I use neither and havent for a while.
 
Two ways I do it, 1 using the adjustment brush, and the second method is layed out on page 213/214 of Scott Kelby's book on LR3.
"Press and hold Alt key and click and hold on the masking slider,the image will turn solid white. Then click and drag the masking slider to the right and parts of the photo will turn black. The black areas are now not getting sharpened.
The further you drag the slider the more non edge areas will become black (not sharpened)."
So you get the effect of the skin being softened while the features of the face sharpened.
When you release the ALT key you can see the effect.
Works a treat.
Must just say though that Scott Kelby's book is very good and without it I wouldn't have been able to get into LR.
Phil. :)
 
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