I had a chance to sit down tonight and play with Portrait Professional by Anthropics Technology.  It does quite an amazing job in such a short amount of time.  Yes you can do the same tricks with PhotoShop but at what cost?  Doing in PhotoShop what you can accomplish with Portrait Professional takes much longer and is waaaaaay more tedious.  Did I mention time consuming?

I did the trial, and that made me like it enough to buy it.  I purchased the Pro Version for $59 bucks (normally $129), which seems like a deal since they offer you a free upgrade to the next full version when it’s released.  Important note: The cheaper $39 version does NOT handle RAW images (among other things), so take that into consideration before buying.

I went back through some of my portraits and decided to pick on the Emily & Libby.  I darkened hair, and moved eyes/nose just a tad.  Everything else the software did automatically.  Granted, at first glance, it looks unnatural if you’ve seen the “before” – if you saw the “after” without knowing the person, you probably wouldn’t think otherwise.

Of course, you can really go to the extreme and make someone look like the poster child for plastic surgery gone horribly wrong (I’ll save that for a separate posting down the road!)

It comes in both PC and Mac versions and you can download both.  Haven’t tried the activation key on both installations yet.

And because I told Jeni that I would…these were very subtle changes.