What portrait touch software to use?

Erbeman

I'm in the process to transitioning from a sports photog to doing portrait and other photography. I know how to use PS well to touch up sports pics, when it comes to smoothing skin. fixing blimishes, fixing wrinkles, etc, I don't have a clue. So what software does everyone use to touch up skin? Looking through the latest ShutterBug magazine, I found an ad for Portrait Professional 9. It looks pretty good on their site and is very reasonably priced. Here is a link: http://www.portraitprofessional.com/.

Thanks in advance.

Qarik

nothing speical for portraits..lightroom 3.

dogwood

You know, I used to spend FAR too much time retouching -- starting in PS to clean the pic up a bit then using Portrait Pro before going back into PS to finish. I could easily spend half hour on a photo.

Then about two months ago I went to a workshop from CRW Media and it was fabulous. Worth the workshop fee even at three times the price.

I now use the CRW techniques every single time I retouch. It's sped up my workflow significantly and I rarely (maybe 1-percent of the time) use Portrait Pro these days (and mostly because I LOVE it's neck lengthening feature). And I rarely spend more than 15 minutes retouching a photo.

I realize that doesn't help you if you're not in a place where CRW is putting on workshops but the point is it's possible to do an awesome, professional retouch quickly using only PS.

Mike J

I use Portrait Professional but am by no means a portrait photography expert. I like it. As you said, it is reasonably inexpensive. You can retouch a photo in less than 1 minute. There are lot of control. I probably use about 40% of these but the nice thing is that you can control the amount of retouching that it does.

Hackbone

A great plug in for photoshop is portraiture by imagenomic.....http://www.imagenomic.com/pt.aspx

dogwood

Hackbone wrote: »

A great plug in for photoshop is portraiture by imagenomic.....http://www.imagenomic.com/pt.aspx

This probably doesn't make a difference to most of you, but Portraiture won't run on Win XP x64 OS. I realize not a lot of folks are using that OS. Portrait Professional does run on XP x64 however.

kevinpw

dogwood wrote: »

You know, I used to spend FAR too much time retouching -- starting in PS to clean the pic up a bit then using Portrait Pro before going back into PS to finish. I could easily spend half hour on a photo.

Then about two months ago I went to a workshop from CRW Media and it was fabulous. Worth the workshop fee even at three times the price.

I now use the CRW techniques every single time I retouch. It's sped up my workflow significantly and I rarely (maybe 1-percent of the time) use Portrait Pro these days (and mostly because I LOVE it's neck lengthening feature). And I rarely spend more than 15 minutes retouching a photo.

I realize that doesn't help you if you're not in a place where CRW is putting on workshops but the point is it's possible to do an awesome, professional retouch quickly using only PS.

what exactly did they teach you at CRW?

anonymouscuban

I'm another that uses Portraiture by Imagenomic. I also have Portrait Professional but find Portraiture works much better. I especially like that I can setup custom profiles. This helps because I can setup defaults for certain people or skin tones that make it much quicker to get consistent results.

However, lately I've been using the Pro-Retouch action that I got from Totally Rad Actions. This is another good option.

dogwood

kevinpw wrote: »

what exactly did they teach you at CRW?

All kinds of stuff! I came away with five pages of notes, plus an eight page manual on retouching, and four PS actions. CRW basically will show you how to retouch much, much faster (and better) than you currently do using only the most basic PS tools. I really can't recommend their workshops enough. The one workshop I took has completely changed the way I retouch.

tomnovy

The best software to retouch portraits and any other photos is Adobe Photoshop. The Portrait Professional - is easy, but i am not a big fan of that software. It make you look on the photos very unnatural. Photoshop + tones of tutorials which you can find for free online. But if you want to do the portraits like real pro then there is a company which makes tutorials for photoshop - how to retouch high standard portraits - http://www.digitalphotoshopretouching.com/order-retouching-dvd the beauty and hair retouching is amazing - expensive but amazing. Go for it if you want to do it like a pro!!!