Going Mobile with Portrait Pro [Tech Tuesday]

Anthropics, the folks who are responsible for PortraitPro (one of my absolute favorite portrait retouching software applications) and, more recently, LandscapePro, have been busy lately. The recent release of PortraitPro for tablets means that the software is now mobile. And even if you only take it with you to the studio, it’s a convenient and easy way to do some quick adjustments or give clients a preview of how you’ll be retouching the subjects of your shoot.

Available for iPad and Android tablets, the app costs $15 and offers all the same retouching categories and sliders of the desktop version. I’ve only been using the iOS app for a short time and installed it on a very old (2nd gen) iPad, so this is a quick first look of the app.

Like the desktop app, PortraitPro places an outline on the subject’s main facial features (you get to choose gender and specify whether it’s an adult or child). Use a finger or a stylus to fine-tune the placement of the identifying outlines and the image is ready for retouching. You have a choice of presets ranging from Female-Glamorous to Male-Enhance Cheekbones, and a multitude of options in between.

For more complete controls, head to the next set of options for face sculpting, skin smoothing, lighting, makeup and pretty much any aspect of a portrait you might want to retouch. You can even change color and hues of makeup, fix a subject’s hair, change the lighting and control shadows, widen the eyes. PortraitPro is a little bit like instant (and painless) virtual plastic surgery, if you want it to be. There’s even a retouching brush with which you can paint on (or erase) effects.

The app is missing a few things from the desktop version including side-by-side comparison (you can tap one of the two before/after icons to switch between the two) and there’s no navigation window to scroll when you’re zoomed in. There aren’t as many save options as there are on the desktop version, but you can make copies along the way to save to the Camera Roll on the iPad. There are also several send/share/save options including email, Facebook, Cloud, etc.

Performance was mixed on my old iPad. Slider adjustments were almost in real time, but some of the functions, like opening the share menu, were sluggish. Whether that’s a function of the app or my iPad is hard to say. While I think the app is great for quick retouches, the image size/resolution limitations and processing power on tablets may restrict you to just roughing out a retouch rather than producing a high-resolution final file on your mobile device. But it’s a great tool for smaller files and for showing a client what’s possible with this powerful retouching software.