PortraitPro

Description

Portrait retouching in Photoshop requires knowledge: how to use frequency separation to smooth skin without losing texture, how to dodge and burn to shape facial features, how to use liquify tools carefully to reshape without creating uncanny distortion. PortraitPro takes care of that workflow for you — it identifies faces in a photo, maps the position of facial features, and applies a full set of retouching adjustments (controlled by sliders) to produce results that would have taken a lot of Photoshop expertise from a user who only needs to drag sliders.

Anthropics Technology built PortraitPro around facial detection and a parametric retouching model that links every adjustment to the detected facial geometry. Smoothing a cheek, reshaping a jawline, enhancing eyes, brightening teeth, adjusting hair volume all work by moving sliders in a panel, with the software calculating the pixel-level adjustments automatically based on the face’s mapped geometry.

FEATURES

Face Detection and Landmark Mapping

PortraitPro identifies faces in a photo and adds feature landmarks — the outlines of eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, jaw, and hairline — which it auto-positions based on trained detection models. A manual adjustment step is provided to allow the landmarks to be moved to correct any misplacement before retouching begins. The accuracy of the placement of landmarks determines the accuracy of the subsequent adjustments to the correct regions of the face. The software works with multiple faces in a single photo, and it is possible to adjust for each face separately.

Skin Retouching

The skin retouching module smooths texture, reduces blemishes and redness, and evens skin tone using sliders to control the strength and extent of each adjustment. Frequency-separation-style processing smooths skin but retains pore texture detail at adjustable levels — maximum smoothing at one extreme, natural texture retention at the other. Targeted adjustments are made to specific areas: under-eye circles, forehead shine, and skin discoloration areas that the landmark map separates from general face skin. Fine detail controls are separate from tone adjustment, so a user can even out redness without removing natural skin texture.

Face Sculpting

Face sculpting is used to adjust the 3-dimensional apparent shape of the facial features with sliders. Jaw width, cheekbone prominence, forehead size, nose width and length, lip fullness, and chin shape have their own sliders. The adjustments apply content-aware warping that keeps the results photorealistic within the range the sliders allow. Face sculpting takes care of the type of reshaping that Photoshop’s liquify tool needs practiced manual control to apply without visible distortion.

Eye Enhancement

Eye adjustments include brightening the iris, increasing the color saturation of the iris, sharpening the pupil edge, reducing redness in the whites, adding catchlight reflections, and adding artificial eyelash enhancement. The pupil size slider changes the apparent pupil diameter. Each eye adjusts independently where they are different — different colors of the iris, different locations of catchlights, or asymmetric conditions that require separate treatment.

Teeth and Lips

Teeth whitening adjusts the brightness and decreases the yellow toning in the tooth area bounded by the lip landmarks. Lip enhancement is used to adjust color saturation, gloss, and fullness of the lips independently of the face sculpting controls.

Hair Enhancement

The hair module brightens and gives shine to the hair area, adjusts color saturation, and can mask gray tones to add consistent color across mixed hair. Hair volume enhancement gives a slight thickening effect to the hair area.

Presets and Batch Processing

Preset collections save entire combinations of slider values for one-click application to subsequent photos with similar lighting and subject characteristics. PortraitPro Studio and Studio Max editions support batch processing, applying a saved preset to a folder of photos automatically without opening each image individually — a workflow used by photographers with high-volume portrait sessions.

Plugin Integration

PortraitPro Studio and Studio Max are run as plugins within Photoshop and Lightroom, adding PortraitPro as a filter or export workflow step within the host application. Running as a plugin enables the combination of the automatic retouching of PortraitPro with the other tools of the host application in a single non-destructive workflow.