Portrait Professional, the new "intelligent" portrait photo touch up software, recently took on Photoshop in a portrait face-off.

Based on new research, the software has been trained in human beauty using hundreds of example photos. So the software has actually "learned" what sort of changes make faces look more attractive.

The result is the software can actively help users make positive improvements to portraits, rather than just being a electronic paintbrush like Photoshop and other image editors.

COMPARATIVE TESTS

To prove the effectiveness of the software, Anthropics Technology has recently run comparative tests using expert Photoshop users with many hundreds of hours of touch up experience and Portrait Professional users with less than 10 hours of experience on the other.

The results proved to be interesting. In face touch up, the non-expert Portrait Professional users consistently outperformed the Photoshop experts, according to ratings by a blind panel judging the quality of the results.

People using Portrait Professional also took a small fraction of the time required by the PhotoShop experts to achieve a similar result -- evidence that it now really is possible for untrained users to enhance portrait photographs to a high professional standard quickly and easily. This simply has not been possible before, according to Anthropics.

HOW IT WORKS

How does Portrait Professional accomplish this?

After a few key points on the face have been identified, virtually any aspect of the face can be enhanced by simply moving sliders. Wrinkles and spots can be reduced or eliminated, as can open pores or greasy skin. Even the lighting can be changed and a face can be subtly reshaped. For instance, shadows from hats can be eliminated, the jaw line can be sharpened to reduce apparent weight or the eyes can be subtly enlarged to increase attractiveness.

The result is that PortraitProfessional 6 allows non-specialist users both to produce high quality face touch up and also to resculpt faces in ways that have simply not been possible before. With this software, work which would have required a skilled touch up artist hours using a traditional editing package can be done in a few minutes.

FREE DEMO

You can try it for yourself by downloading the free trial version PortraitProfessional from http://www.portraitprofessional.com. The software is currently on sale for $59.95.

See also our review of the Windows version. A Macintosh version is in development for release early next year.