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What Software For Portrait retouching?

R

rollsman44

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 5, 2012
13
0
I have a Power Mac G5 and I am sure there are NO or very few Retouching programs for it( NOT INTEL) So, I am thinking about buying a Newer Computer ( Mac) so I have more access to Newer Portrait programs( Portrait Professional???) Any suggestions is greatly appreciated. I cant break the bank.
Thanks, rollsman
 
rollsman44 said:
I have a Power Mac G5 and I am sure there are NO or very few Retouching programs for it( NOT INTEL) So, I am thinking about buying a Newer Computer ( Mac) so I have more access to Newer Portrait programs( Portrait Professional???) Any suggestions is greatly appreciated. I cant break the bank.
Thanks, rollsman
Click to expand...

Lightroom 3 is great if you shoot RAW. I'm sure Aperture 3 is just as good, too (and cheaper, now).
 
rollsman44 said:
I have a Power Mac G5 and I am sure there are NO or very few Retouching programs for it( NOT INTEL) So, I am thinking about buying a Newer Computer ( Mac) so I have more access to Newer Portrait programs( Portrait Professional???) Any suggestions is greatly appreciated. I cant break the bank.
Thanks, rollsman
Click to expand...

It depends what you want. Portrait professional just blurs out softer areas. It looks completely awful. i've seen their advertisements. They obviously sharpen the skin in their before images and make it look rougher. You'd be better off not doing that and leaving these people looking like people with just some basic de-blemishing in an image editing program like photoshop or pixelmator.

Are you just going through hundreds or thousands of images that must be processed in such a way?
 
I agree, if you have Photoshop and Lightroom 3 you have what you need to do portrait (and any photo for that matter) touch ups.
 
I have LR 2 and CS3. I was looking at Capture One Pro 6 or Aperature 3
I am NOW semi retired from Photography but still want ot do some retouching. I now send it out. I could save some $$$ and NOT buy a Separate
Computer just for my photos. Makes Sense or??? Thanks, rollsman
 
rollsman44 said:
I have LR 2 and CS3. I was looking at Capture One Pro 6 or Aperature 3
I am NOW semi retired from Photography but still want ot do some retouching. I now send it out. I could save some $$$ and NOT buy a Separate
Computer just for my photos. Makes Sense or??? Thanks, rollsman
Click to expand...

The question is what can't you do in CS3 that you want to do?

Paul
 
Remove Blemishes, add pop to the eyes, remove wrinkles and bags under the eyes, thin the face out etc. I want to be able to do these as fast as possible ( in least amount of time). Thank you
 
rollsman44 said:
Remove Blemishes, add pop to the eyes, remove wrinkles and bags under the eyes, thin the face out etc. I want to be able to do these as fast as possible ( in least amount of time). Thank you
Click to expand...

A lot of the skin smoothing techniques blur the skin to some degree e.g. Inverted Highpass, band stop etc.

Portrait pro does a pretty good job, but you need to be careful with it, e.g. applying a small amount then putting on a separate layer and reducing the opacity.

From what i hear its often used to do a whole batch of photo's as an automated action, e.g. if your a wedding photog with a 1000 photo's you can just run portraiture in a batch action, and come back in a couple of hours when its done.

Sure if you have a tablet and a few hours D & B will give much better results, but thats a few hours vs a few seconds.

I think you can get a free trail of portrait pro? If not try the retouchpro forum i'm sure you will find threads on it there.
 
rollsman44 said:
Remove Blemishes, add pop to the eyes, remove wrinkles and bags under the eyes, thin the face out etc. I want to be able to do these as fast as possible ( in least amount of time). Thank you
Click to expand...

That's all very doable with PS. As an example, you can remove wrinkles and bags by cloning the image into a layer, blurring the layer then adjusting visibility of the blurred layer in seconds. Thinning the face can probably be done a bit with a resize, though short side lighting is the best way to do that. Selecting the iris, adding contrast and saturation is quick and easy in PS as well. Outside of that, workflow examples and automated actions are but a Google away- try "CS3 portrait actions" as an example.

Paul
 
compuwar said:
That's all very doable with PS. As an example, you can remove wrinkles and bags by cloning the image into a layer, blurring the layer then adjusting visibility of the blurred layer in seconds. Thinning the face can probably be done a bit with a resize, though short side lighting is the best way to do that. Selecting the iris, adding contrast and saturation is quick and easy in PS as well. Outside of that, workflow examples and automated actions are but a Google away- try "CS3 portrait actions" as an example.

Paul
Click to expand...

One of the main things portraiture does is it automatically adds the mask for you (and it works a lot better then you think it would!!) so the smoothing effect is automatically added to just the skin areas.

This means you can batch the whole process, e.g. run a 1000 photo's through it and never have to touch your mac once.

Photoshop actions will require you to select the skin areas or paint in the effect, which does take time, mins maybe,

As I only very occasionally do this I use actions as compuwar suggests...good things to google are IHP (inverted high pass), Degrunge, frequency separation, bandstop, etc

But for ultimate speed and ease and a reasonable result its hard to knock portraiture.
 
TheDrift- said:
This means you can batch the whole process, e.g. run a 1000 photo's through it and never have to touch your mac once.
Click to expand...

If you're doing a thousand portraits, a new system and software shouldn't be a big deal- but that's quite a different definition of semi-retired than I imagined!

Paul
 
MattSepeta said:
Photoshop 6.0 did everything you need to do

You dont need a new program, and you certainly dont need a new system :)
Click to expand...

if i can do this with Freehand 10 and PS 6, anyone can do it too. cameras used are Coolpix 5000 and 8800 :D Powerbook G4 running classic (OS9). primitive, slower but it was PAID FOR in 2001. LOL1!
seriously looking at that CS stuff.
http://gearstylequarterly.com/
 
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