portrait pro software opinions?

[robfilms]

lately, i have been focusing (pun intended) my efforts on window light portraits.

i saw that portrait pro just released v17.

i am not a lr/ps user.

i have recently come under the sway of luminar 2018.

i find their use of sliders, filters and presets more to my liking.

(luminar is by far not perfect but for me, more enjoyable)

i wondered what the general consensus was concerning whether portrait pro was a decent piece of software and worth the time/expense.

thanks in advance to those who care to share.

be well.

rob

 

[Toddster]

I have a bit of a hate/love relationship with Portrait Pro. I never use it for anything that I am working on for myself. In general I think that it is difficult to get natural looking results. However on several occasions as the "photo expert" in the family I have been imposed upon to turn a bunch of photo snapshots from others into "portraits". Usually from a wedding where they did not hire a photographer. The first time I did this I spent quite a bit of time in PS and LR only to realize later that people who don't hire a photographer to begin with are not necessarily appreciative of the level of effort it required. The next time I tried Portrait Pro for the faces and Perfectly Clear for the overall picture. Click, click,click and I was done. I never would have put my name on the results, I didn't like them. They were however a resounding hit with family. Then just for fun I took it a step further and went back to Portrait Pro to apply some face slimming and a few other tweaks. To my eye the results were far worse. I chose a few people in the pictures and presented both versions side by side (without telling them what had been done) and ask them to choose the better version. Very often the most over processed image they were presented with was the favorite So clearly; to each his own.

The version that I have is v11. It is certainly possible that it has improved in more recent versions but this works for the few times that I use it. I'd recommend experimenting with the trial with a very critical eye toward how natural the final result looks.

 

[Ossiva]

I've been eyeing portrait pro v17. Might take it out for a test drive, but I'm weary about the quality of anything claiming to be extremely easy.

It's hard to believe what appeals to a lot of people. A friend of mine hired a widely liked wedding photographer in his large town. The guy and his assistant showed up with a set of the latest Canon 5D's with L glass. Good start. However, I think they ran almost all of the pictures through Topaz Adjust afterwards to give them a something of a grunge look that was consistent with with the slight Western theme to the venue. They then over softened the skin, making most of the people look like mannequins. I thought the pictures were hideous, but everyone was raving about how great and detailed they were on Facebook. At the end of the day, the client is always right I suppose.

If I do a trial of portrait pro v17, I will report back. Disclaimer: I'm not a professional and mainly shoot free for relatives and friends. I just enjoy the art of the process, but wouldn't mind going pro one day...

 

[Deleted member 20897]

Prior to buying PortraitPro I used onOne Portraiture. That has since been discontinued.
Why did I not use PortraitPro from the get go? While I'm OK with a bit of retouching, I do not like resculpting or changing a persons physique or facial structure.

PortraitPro used to advertise on that very premise.

Now, they happen to be the biggest game in town. I turned off all the "resculpting" features and only use the retouching.
Is there anything in this program that I couldn't do in Lightroom/Photoshop? No...but in some of the jobs I do, I can have over 100 portraits that I need to work on. Working each image manually through Lightroom/Photoshop is a lot of time.

I'm all about saving time and PortraitPro allows me to do that. I can have it do the retouching adjustments I want between as a baseline between 2-4 minutes per image.

So, is it worth it? For me yes, having a time saver is worth the expense of the software. If I only did a few images a month, then no. It really comes down to what is your time worth and could that time be better spent somewhere else?

 

[Ossiva]

Is there anything in this program that I couldn't do in Lightroom/Photoshop? No...but in some of the jobs I do, I can have over 100 portraits that I need to work on. Working each image manually through Lightroom/Photoshop is a lot of time.

Can you get equivalent results in Portraitpro to using frequency separation and liquify in Photoshop? Getting skin believably smooth is an art.

 

[Deleted member 20897]

Can you get equivalent results in Portraitpro to using frequency separation and liquify in Photoshop? Getting skin believably smooth is an art.

You can. It does have masking and you can adjust the intensity of any of the sections it provides. I'm still relatively new to it, and I'm not getting the same level of results that I was getting with onOne Portraiture...but I will eventually.

 

[robfilms]

all-

thank you for the feedback.

i remain interested in the portraitpro software, especially at the discounted price.

thumbs up.

rob

 

[davidzvi]

I used Imagenomic Portraiture for a while along with their Noiseware. I like that the basic functions were much more toward skin smoothing and such. Most of my work is on Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, so teens with acne. Did a real nice job and easy to setup as a batch process job. But that was in the early days of LR, before all the spot healing / content aware features. With those and improved noise reduction (and improved high ISO) I haven't found the need to really use either in years.


Portraiture for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom

 

[Linden]

I’m a long time user of Imagenomic Portraiture, and I’ve done some freq separation as well. I also own the latest version of portrait/body pro (just got it a couple of weeks ago). IMO the results can very easily become unnatural and not even look like the subject anymore with portrait pro, but I’m new to it so maybe that’s just me. Many of the examples on their site are a little over cooked for my taste as well, so maybe it’s just their philosophy. It’s neat for adding makeup effects and the lighting control is kind of nice, but I’ve been able to get much more natural results from portraiture/freq separation I don’t know that I’d use Portrait Pro for paid work just yet, as all my results so far tend to look fake, but honestly I haven’t processed but maybe a half dozen photos in it just to try it out and play around.

 

[Clint]

...
i saw that portrait pro just released v17.

i wondered what the general consensus was concerning whether portrait pro was a decent piece of software and worth the time/expense.

Portrait Pro 17 is very good. It takes a little time and experience to understand what can be done and what should not be done - I turned off the face sculpting and made my own presets. I do quite a few portraits/head shots and the software saves me considerable time.

From Lightroom I'll edit in Photoshop, and then use PortraitPro. When PortraitPro has finished and I have the layer in Photoshop, I'll reduce the Opacity of that layer till I like the looks and then save back to Lightroom.