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This article is from June 1, 2009, and is no longer current.

Anthropics Launches Portrait Professional 9

New Portrait Professional 9 is portrait airbrushing software that has been trained in human appearance using thousands of example photographs. The software therefore has a built in knowledge base of human beauty, which makes it far faster and easier to use than conventional airbrushing software.
How does this work? For any given face, the software creates custom controls specifically to enhance that particular face. For example, if the face has a heavy jaw or double chin, Portrait Professional’s ‘jaw slider’ control will reduce the fatness of the jaw. On the other hand, if the jaw was rather weak or small, the slider would subtly enlarge it. The software contains over 100 ‘intelligent’ sliders of this nature, plus an automatic touch-up brush to give the user fine control over the appearance of the face and hair.
In addition, Portrait Professional 9 incorporates new patent applied for ClearSkinâ„¢ skin beautifying technology. This enables skin defects such as acne, blotchiness, roughness, wrinkles, age spots, grease and other skin problems to be automatically removed leaving the skin looking natural and well textured. No more featureless, plastic over airbrushed look that characterizes much skin touch-up.
This innate knowledge of human appearance, plus the new ClearSkinâ„¢ automatic skin enhancer, makes Portrait Professional 9 far easier to use than traditional touch-up software and much faster than traditional touch-up software.
After a simple mark-up stage, users can instantly enhance all aspects of the skin, face and hair simply by moving sliders or simply by touching any defect with the intelligent touch-up brush.
Portrait Professional 9 Features
With Portrait Professional 9, untrained, non specialist users can quickly and easily:
* Automatically eliminate skin blemishes such as spots or pimples leaving completely natural looking skin, however big the blemish.
* Remove grease, sweat or unsightly white highlights from the skin
* Reduce or remove wrinkles and lines again leaving exceptionally natural looking skin
* Subtly reshape different aspects of the face to make it slimmer or more attractive
* Adjust the lighting on the face to make it more flattering or remove hat shadows
* Brighten or change eye color, and enhance whiteness of the eyes
*
Whiten teeth, recolor and reshape the lips
* Thicken, color or smooth hair
All these touch-up process requires no special artistic skills thanks to the built-in intelligence of the software.
Available In Two Versions
Portrait Professional is available in two versions targeted at keen amateur and professional photographers:
Portrait Professional Standard 9
This is the stand alone version that offers all of the new ultra sophisticated face, skin and hair touch-up facilities but does not include the Photoshopâ„¢ plug-in, batch mode productivity features or the RAW file support that professional and semi-professional photographers require.
Portrait Professional Studio 9
This is the version designed for photographers who crave for the ultimate in productivity and color accuracy. Portrait Professional Studio can be configured as stand alone or as a Lightroomâ„¢ or Photoshopâ„¢ plug-in to speed workflow. It also works directly with Camera RAW.
New Features Of Portrait Professional 9: Both Versions
* New, world leading ‘ClearSkin™’ skin improving technology. Portrait Professional 9 includes unique new applied patent ‘ClearSkin™’ skin texturing technology that both add greatly to the realism of the skin after enhancement. It enables ‘blown’ or burnt out highlights on the skin to be successfully retrieved and realistically re-textured in seconds. To the best of our knowledge, this innovative feature is unique and puts clear blue water between Portrait Professional and other skin enhancing packages. For the first time, the ClearSkin™ technology enables anybody to achieve ultra realistic skin enhancing effects literally in seconds.
* New, enhanced, intelligent touch-up brush. The new skin touch-up brush in version 9 requires no precision or skills on the user’s part. It automatically finds any skin defect under the brush and replaces it with natural skin texture using the ClearSkin™ technology. The result is a realistic natural touch-up with absolute minimum effort or skill on the users’ part.
* Full multi-processor support for a major speed increase. Portrait Professional 9 now supports multi-threading resulting in a major performance boost for users with multi-core or multi-processor machines.
* Supports profile shoots. In response to many user requests, Portrait Professional 9 now handles profile shots as well as full face enabling face shape enhancing on any face orientation.
* Improved teeth and eye enhancements. The eye and teeth enhancement has been significantly improved giving a more uniform and realistic whiteness and improved eye re-coloring controls. In addition, the eye pupil can be automatically widened. Catch lights in the eyes can now be added, removed, reshaped or enhanced.
* New face, picture and hair vibrance controls. The control sliders allow the vibrancy of face color to be increased without causing neutral areas to get unwanted color casts. The net result is more vibrant natural looking portraits.
* New Skin Smoothing or ‘Blotchiness’ control. The skin smoothing control is a great time saver as it evens any blotchiness or large defects on the skin simply by moving a slider.
* New User Interface. The interface has been significantly upgraded in version 9 to make it more users’ friendly and a lot easier to use with the brush tool now conveniently located for instant access.
New Features Of Portrait Professional 9 Studio
Portrait Professional Studio contains all the features of Portrait Professional plus:
* New Stand-alone and Adobe PhotoShop™ plug-in version. Version 9 Studio works both as stand-alone and as a Photoshop plug-in for both PC and Mac. This version has been developed to meet enthusiasts and professional photographers’ demands for PhotoShop plug-in compatibility in order to enhance their workflow.
* Enhanced color profiles and extended RAW file support. Portrait Professional 9 Studio enables direct access to camera RAW files applications and allows absolute color calibration control of images that high end enthusiast and professional users require. In addition, RAW support has been applied as a plug-in so as new cameras and formats come onto the market support can be instantly added.
* New batch mode to speed throughput and workflow. This version 9 Studio also has a batch mode incorporated to enable photographers to enhance lots of images and speed through the work faster and more efficiently than was hitherto possible.
System Requirements
PC
* Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista
* 1Ghz CPU or better
* Min 512MB RAM XP, 1GB RAM Vista
Mac
* OSX 10.4 or later
* Intel CPU 1Ghz or better
* 512MB RAM or more
Note: While Portrait Professional 9 is compatible with all modern Intel Macs, it not compatible with older PowerPC Macs.
Pricing

  • Anonymous says:

    Anyone buying this software should be aware that the customer support is absolutely horrible. I bought the upgrade to update from v9.8 to v10. When I try to do so, I get a message telling me that the upgrade is not for the program I have. When I try to submit a help ticket, I receive an email telling me that I do not have a previous valid license. When I try calling the U.S. telephone number, I am greeted by an automated voice message from a guy with a snotty English accent telling me that I cannot receive telephone support, and that I must use the website to submit a help ticket… and around and around we go…

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