I would like you to open Photoshop and to follow the tutorial and you will see it will take only a minute to complete it. Why? You’re smart, that’s why.

Once you have opened a photograph that would like work on, let’s begin.

Refine Edge is a tool that is very useful for photographers as well as for home users. What does it do? Refine Edge helps you replace tricky backgrounds and fine details (soft edges and hair) from a photo with ease.

Enough talking, I want to show you how to get it done.

1. Begin! Select the subject from your photograph using Quick Selection Tool (W). Use the Add tor Selection and Subtract from Selection buttons to make sure you select your subject nicely. When you get to hair and soft areas, it’s better to select less.

Should look something like in the image above.

2. Open the Refine Edge dialog. First stop: View Mode; most of the times I’ll use the black background, depends on photo. Second, Edge Detection. Here you need a small radius number, not too high and you’ll see why. Third, Adjust Edge. How about experimenting what works for you? Never forget of the smooth setting, very useful. Fourth and last, is how we save the photo we worked on (Output to), and you’ll have a list to choose from. Above that there’s a box unticked saying “Decontaminate colors” which you should keep ticked at all times, and of course the amount at 100%. It’s very useful when there’s color “spill” from background to your subject.

Remember settings is a good one to have ticked too. That’s all the ticking work that is needed. I always choose to save the photo as a new document with a layer mask.

3. The most interesting things about these settings are the tricks you can do, it’s Photoshop after all. On the left of the settings box you can see three objects: a magnifier(zooming), a hand(moving if you zoom in a bit), and a brush. Click right on the brush and you have a list there.

Using this tool you draw over the “tricky” edges. Keep the brush small enough to  not select too much, just the area containing fine detail. Photoshop will treat that as “transition” area between inside and outside selection and will do its best to figure out what to keep.

Final Result

Mastering the Refine Edge takes time, but then again, practice makes perfect, isn’t it ?

Ethics? What ethics?

Without trying to justify the abuses of retouching, it does has its uses. Acne for example is something transitory, I’ve had models with a few spots now and a perfect skin a week later – what should have I done, postpone the shoot? Ask her to put a thicker layer of makeup? (have you seen how much makeup is used in film/tv?) Moreover, the camera and studio lights are unforgiving. Stuff you’ll never notice in real life, like small wrinkles, shine and so on, become painfully obvious at when captured in full 25 Mp resolution. And even before Photoshop, people were using makeup and airbrushing and favourable angles to get the most flattering look.

The moral dilemma is, obviously, where to draw the line?

Portrait Professional 9 from Anthropics is definitely not going to make the previous question any simpler because, if anything, it pushes the boundaries further, allowing one to enhance portraits so easily it’s almost ridiculous.

How it works

At a glance, it’s a stand-alone program (not a Photoshop plugin) that does face sculpting, eye recoloring, skin repair, hair repair, teeth whitening and more. What’s really cool about it is that it creates some sort of a 3D model of the face, so after you set the control points, most adjustments are fully automatic.

You start by loading a picture and choosing the gender. You then click to indicate the corners of the eyes, the tip of the nose and the mouth. After that the program will build something like a wireframe model of the head, which you can fine-tune. I found that this is the most important stage; misplacing control points can lead to poor results.

In this screen you align the wireframe model with the facial features

After the model is built, the fun begins. The program has a very simple interface based on sliders.

The main slider areas are:

• Face sculpt (head, jaw, nose, neck, eyes, mouth);
• Skin controls (spots, wrinkles, shadows, hue, shine, texture);
• Eyes (whiten &brighten, sharpen, eye color, darken pupil, remove reflections);
• Mouth (whiten & brighten teeth, lip saturation and colour);
• Hair (shine, tidy, vibrance);
• Skin lighting (shadows, relight, contrast, highlights).

Overall, there are enough sliders to keep you happy for hours.

Almost anything can be ajusted via sliders

There are some mask-painting features to restrict the skin and hair areas. The skin controls even feature a Texture selection that allows you to retexture the skin so it doesn’t appear unnaturally smooth. The Skin lighting controls seemed the least useful, at least for me, but I think it can help in bad lighting situations.

Enough theory, let’s see it in action

Scenario 1 – spots

This is an all-time favorite. So ephemeral yet so low-esteem-inducing, they appear exactly when you want them the least – like before a photo session.

Removing spots and wrinkles is a one-click process

In the original, the acne was visible even with the makeup. The image on right is the result of automatic processing in Portrait Professional. Perfect skin yet not plastic-like.

Scenario 2 – Skin shine, teeth and eyes

Here I had a beautiful model with a different – it was very hot and the lighting was pretty crappy (indoors, available light – tungsten – yuk!).

With one click, skin was cleaned up, shine removed, teeth whitened and just for fun I recolored the eyes too

Sweat on makeup is always an issue, but Portrait Professional managed to clean it nicely. Also note some subtle teeth whitening (not really needed). Just for kicks, I made the eyes wider and changed their color.

Scenario 3 – Playing God with Face Sculpting

This is THE feature that sets Portrait Professional apart from competition. In short, it uses some internal algorithms to determine the facial structure and “push” them towards an ideal. Obviously, not everyone is going to like it. I tried some face sculpting on a photo of my wife and she hated it; others have loved the results.

This is understandable because, as the program tries to alter the photo to perfection, it also destroys one’s uniqueness (as an example, look at a beauty pageant – the contestants tend to look all the same) and I mean it when I say “perfection is boring“.

There’s something disturbingly fascinating in reshaping someone’s body to fit an idealized fantasy. Perhaps Photoshop (and plastic surgery) has made us all into little Frankensteins or Doctors Moreau, always trying to undo God’s / Nature’s work. But I digress.

For the final example I chose someone with a great attitude and a small flaw. She had a rather big jaw compared with the rest of her hear. I did not have Portrait Professional when I took the photos, but decided to try it now for this review and see what would the program do in her case.

Since there are many subtle changes difficult to notice side-by-side, I included a flash animation for the Before and After.

Conclusions

It took me a while to realize it, but the makers of Portrait Professional want it to be seen as an alternative to Photoshop (one of the reasons it’s a standalone app and not a plugin) and at $69 it’s quite tempting. It can definitely turn a few hours of retouching into a 10 minute play time and if used sparingly it can do wonders.

The downsides? Well, if everybody get their hand on it, no Facebook pic will remain untouched. God help us all.