If you’re in the business of taking portrait photographs, and you want to deliver the very best images to your clients, you need to master the art of retouching. This is what separates the very best portrait studios from casual photographers and hobbyists.
The problem is that retouching isn’t just a tricky skill to master; it’s also a time-consuming process. Relying on conventional software, it can take hours to fine-tune a single photo, smoothing skin, covering up blemishes, and getting the lighting and color balance just right.
Anthropics PortraitPro aims to change that. Marketed as the “world’s best retouching software,” the latest version of this program (PortraitPro 24) uses AI technology to help you enjoy professional-level retouching at remarkably fast speeds.
Many portrait photographers use this tool on a daily basis, so I decided to see for myself what it could do. Read on through my Anthropics PortraitPro review for my full thoughts, including pros, cons, use cases, and key features.
What Does Portrait Pro Offer?
If you’re not familiar with Anthropics PortraitPro, here’s a quick overview.
PortraitPro, formerly known as Portrait Professional, is a portrait photography retouching software developed by Anthropics Technology. It’s been around for quite some time, with the first version releasing in 2006 and the latest (v24) in 2024.
The original version was relatively rudimentary, but PortraitPro has improved greatly over the years. PortraitPro 9, for example, introduced ClearSkin skin enhancement technology to automatically remove blemishes and imperfections, while version 10 added a Child mode for working with pictures of minors.
The more recent versions have naturally leveraged AI technology, resulting in even faster and more precise performance, with AI-powered scanning and corrections making PortraitPro more efficient than ever before.
It’s suitable for all sorts of retouching tasks, from skin smoothing to hair editing and even the ability to reduce glare and reflections in subjects’ glasses. In short, it can be your primary go-to solution as far as retouching is concerned.
Key Features of PortraitPro for Portrait Photographers
Now that you know the basics, let’s take a closer look at this software in action, exploring some of its key features and looking at how well they work in practice.
AI Gender, Age, and Face Detection
PortraitPro doesn’t waste any time in processing and improving your photos. As soon as you upload an image, the AI automatically scans it, detecting the subject’s gender, an estimated age range, and marking all of their main facial features, too.
It only takes a matter of seconds, and I found this feature to be almost always accurate.
I tested out various photos of both male and female subjects of various age ranges, including some subjects with more androgynous appearances, and the software correctly identified them each time.
It also accurately tagged their mouths, noses, jaws, eyes, eyebrows, and hairline, which is helpful when it comes to adjusting or reshaping those features.
If it does make a mistake, which is quite a rare occurrence, then you can simply click and drag the dots to their correct positions, like so:
Retouching Filters
As well as automatically detecting the age and gender of your subject, PortraitPro also automatically applies a retouching filter to your photos as you upload them.
You can create and customize your own presets to apply in this way, or choose from dozens of built-in options from the “Presets” menu in the sidebar.
As the image above shows, some of the presets focus on specific changes, like skin smoothing or lighting, or even specific features, like the eyes and hair. Others are more general-purpose, designed to make broad changes to the subject’s full face, all with the single click of a button.
I experimented with quite a few of these filters and found mixed results.
Some, in my opinion, are a little too heavy.
The “Maximum Sculpt” preset, for example, changed my subject’s features so much she looked like a completely different person:
Others, however, seem to strike the right balance, making subtle but valuable changes without going too far into “over-edited” territory.
I also appreciate the fact that each preset offers an adjustable “Intensity” slider, with ratings from 1 to 200, that controls how great the changes are.
For example, the “Glamorous 1” preset at a low-level 18 intensity produces this result, with smoothed skin, less visible freckles, slightly fuller lips, and sharper brows.
At a much higher intensity rating of 110, however, the changes are far more dramatic, with much more visible reshaping along the jawline, the addition of digital makeup around the eyes, and more “airbrushed” skin.
At higher intensities, the changes felt too intense for my personal tastes, but it’s all a question of subjectivity.
If you’re editing images of a model or working with a client who doesn’t mind some heavy editing to get the look they want, the Intensity slider will allow you to make big changes in small amounts of time.
Controls
Of course, you don’t necessarily have to use the presets when working with portraits in PortraitPro. You’re free to control and customize every single element of your images using the app’s dizzying array of facial feature sliders.
Under the “Controls” tab in the sidebar, I found countless options for adjusting the likes of skin smoothness, makeup, eyes, hair, lighting, mouth, nose, face shape, and so on.
There are also additional tools buried at the bottom of this menu for cropping your photos, removing noise, adding effects, and even replacing the sky or background, too.
The range of sliders and options here is impressive, but what struck me most was the responsiveness. You can upload an image and adjust sliders on the fly, watching the changes appear almost instantly and comparing the “Before” and “After” versions of your image as you go.
PortraitPro Strengths and Limitations
Having spent some time with PortraitPro, I can thoroughly understand why it has become the tool of choice for so many portrait photographers and studios. Having said that, it’s not without its flaws, and I do feel that there’s still room for improvement in future versions.
Strengths:
- Speed and Efficiency: Retouching with conventional tools can take hours. With PortraitPro, it’s almost instantaneous. You can upload a photo and fix its flaws in a matter of minutes, with only minimal manual input needed.
- Advanced AI Features: Anthropics has made smart use of AI in the latest version of PortraitPro. It hasn’t gone overboard with excessive AI generation, but uses this technology cleverly for more precise and efficient facial sculpting, digital makeup, and hair editing.
- Range of Functions: There’s a wide range of what users can do with PortraitPro. It handles almost every imaginable aspect of the portrait retouching process, from blemish removal to hair color adjustments.
- Batch Editing: If you’re willing to pay the higher price for the Studio Max version of PortraitPro, it offers some of the best batch processing I’ve seen in any retouching software. It can work through a large amount of images in mere minutes.
- Easy to Use: For such an advanced tool, PortraitPro is reasonably intuitive. Even beginners should feel at home with this software’s interface, with clearly labeled buttons and features making it easy to understand the basics.
Limitations:
- Over-Editing: Like many other retouching applications, especially those that use AI, there is a risk of going too far when retouching with PortraitPro. I found that some of its filters and features made my subjects look artificial and over-edited.
- Feature Gating: While the Standard version of PortraitPro unlocks most of the software’s key features, it doesn’t support RAW files, nor does it offer batch processing. This forces users into paying extra for either the Studio or Studio Max versions.
- Inconsistent Results: While I largely enjoyed great quality results when working with PortraitPro, its features didn’t always live up to their potential. I’ve also heard from other users that they sometimes have to play around with the sliders or undo changes that don’t quite work out.
Potential Use Cases
PortraitPro was designed exclusively with retouching in mind. As such, while it won’t appeal to the likes of landscape or nature photographers, it’s a potential must-have for portrait photographers.
If you regularly take headshots, wedding photos, beauty portraits, and similar styles of photographs, it offers the features you need to perfect them, while also saving yourself hours.
Capable of carrying out skin smoothing, facial reshaping, digital beauty enhancements, hair editing, eye editing, and more, it can help you touch up everything from your selfies and social media profile pictures to portraits you’ve taken of professional clients. Even those working with large quantities of photos can find value in this tool, thanks to the automated batch workflows provided in the Studio Max version.
More: Creating Stunning Portraits With AI-Based Retouching Tools
Pricing
Unlike a large number of AI-powered platforms and tools, you don’t need to pay a monthly fee or sign up to a recurring subscription to enjoy the benefits of Anthropics PortraitPro. You can simply pay a one-time fee and enjoy full access, with discounted rates available for those upgrading from prior versions.
To be more precise, Anthropics offers three different versions of this software, at three distinct price points:
- Standard: At $65.95, this is the cheapest option you can buy. It unlocks access to all of the core features of PortraitPro, including automatic age and gender detection, AI-powered skin smoothing, face sculpting, feature enhancements, makeup controls, 3D lighting effects, and so on. However, it lacks a few bonus features that may be of value to you, like RAW support.
- Studio: For $99.95, you can enjoy all the benefits of the Standard software, plus RAW and DNG file support, the ability to use PortraitPro as a Photoshop plug-in or external editor with Lightroom, and the option to read and write both TIFF and PNG files with 16 bits per color sample. It’s an impressive upgrade over the Standard version, but lacks batch processing.
- Studio Max: The most expensive of the three options, the Studio Max version of PortraitPro costs $199.95 and is primarily aimed at photo studios and teams, or users who intend to process large numbers of images. It comes with everything in the Studio version, plus fully automatic batch processing, which means you can work with huge numbers of images at speed.
There is also a free trial version that lets you test out some of the features. Overall, considering these are just one-time fees, not recurring payments, I feel that the pricing for PortraitPro is relatively fair, though the jump in price from Studio to Studio Max is quite sizable.
It’s worth noting, too, that Anthropics offers a free trial of this software, giving new users the chance to test out its features before deciding to pay the license fee. Note, however, that saving and printing functions are disabled in the trial version, so it’s purely designed for testing purposes.
The Final Verdict: Is It Worth It?
I went into this tool having heard that PortraitPro was one of, if not the best, retouching programs on the market. Having worked with it, I can confirm that it’s certainly one of the better options I’ve ever used, managing to offer both a beginner-friendly interface with an advanced suite of retouching and reshaping features.
It incorporates AI technology in a smart and balanced way, offers dozens of presets and automated features to save you time, and can produce truly jaw-dropping results when used correctly. At the same time, like other apps of this kind, it still comes with a certain learning curve, and users will need to take time learning the features to avoid making images that look excessively edited or “plastic.”
The pricing is a slight drawback, too – the Studio Max version is significantly more expensive than the rest – but aside from these issues, I found a lot to love in Anthropics PortraitPro. It’s fast, efficient, and largely reliable, transforming what has, in the past, been quite a tedious and laborious process into something that feels much smoother, sleeker, and more intuitive.
