Photography News Issue 55

Photography News | Issue 55 | photographynews.co.uk

First tests

Anthropics Portrait Professional BodyStudio 2 from£29.99

Portrait Professional Body is aimed at improving full-length shots, rather than its forebear’s facial focus. It slims, corrects postures and removes pinches and bulges in clothing. It also corrects faces and smooths skin, and anything youdoshouldbe,intheory,muchfaster and easier than working manually with a tool like Liquify in Photoshop. Buy the ‘Studio’ version and it works as a plug-in to Photoshop, or you can run it standalone. It also handles Raw files. New things in version 2 include better warp masking (where you fix background elements affected by warping a figure), integration with Photoshop Smart Objects, and a Lite mode that reduces the number of tools to those which don’t require marking up the subject. Now of course, the first question is ‘shouldn’t you be using your photographic skill to improve figures, for example learning to pose people in the most attractive way?’ Almost certainly, but when all else fails, the software may help. Loading it up for the first time you get a quick tutorial. This is excellent, explaining well the main tools, for instance how the basic sliders work to warp various sections of the body, how to ‘mark up’ a figure ready to work on, and how to mask the effect where it’s not needed. Loading up an image, the first thing you have to do is mark up the subject. You’re asked to first click on the nose, pick a male or female form, and then click on the various joints forming a virtual skeleton, right shoulder, right elbow, right wrist and so on. Next, lines appear near the limbs and you drag them in to match the outline of arms, legs and torso. Finally, if body parts overlap you’re asked to choose how so by clicking on a ‘in front’ or ‘behind’ picture, for example an arm being held behind the torso. It’s very quick and easy, though sometimes I found the instructions getting in the way of accuracy. Once you finish marking up, there’s some calculation, and after that you can go back and tweak the shape if required, with no annoying annotations blocking the view. Next you either drag on the lines to alter

Specs

Prices £49.99 (free trial available); regular version £29.99 Features Studio edition supports Raw files, works in 16-bit, can be used as a Photoshop plug-in System requirements Windows: Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, or Vista Mac: OSX 10.7 or later Contact portraitprobody.com

Portrait Professional Body works well. Minor changes are effective, and like any tool, it’s up to you, the user, not to push it too far; use of the ‘flip to original’ button is vital in making sure you don’t. Editing is probably easier than using the equivalent tools in Photoshop and there’s certainly plenty of handholding. Pros Easy to use, lots of options, mostly good results Cons Some slowdown, occasionally clunky navigation I found the magnifier tool a bit clunky for navigation, and missed by usual Hand tool scrubbing as in Photoshop, but as usual it’s a matter of getting used to things. Speed is good with most adjustments being made in real time; I was working on a mid-2015 MacBook Pro, 2.2GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB ram and Intel Iris Pro 1536MB graphics card. There was occasional lag though, particularly when editing in the Face panel. KS Verdict streamlined methods to the regular Portrait Professional package. At the bottom of the options is Picture with a range of colour and contrast settings. The big question is how well its warping functions work on figures against complex backgrounds. For example, a person against a brick wall; changes will stretch and bend the background too, making straight lines bow. To address this PP Body has a Warp Fixer where you paint over affected areas to restore them to normal. Most of the time this works fine, but I did find it occasionally struggled, leaving the background torn. Overall, the simpler the backdrop the easier it is to make adjustment, just as you’d expect as all the software is doing is pushing pixels around. As editing can take a while, projects can be saved in progress, so there’s no problem revisiting something; in fact it’s sometimes a good thing, as fresh eyes can make you think you’ve pushed the effects too far.

Images Easy to use and with plenty of features, this software lets you fine-tune your full-length shots in a very effective manner. At £49.99 for the full version, it is respectable value for money too.

body shape or use sliders. I found the latter much easier; control is more restrained, and I was less prone to twisting the subject into some tortured and distorted mess. The first set of sliders is Shape; controlling height, curviness (‘build’ if the subject ismale), slimness and lift, which pushes the chest and waist up without affecting height. Then you fine-tune specific areas; like the arms, chest or hips, change the skeletal shape, thinning shoulders or lengthening the neck. Next, the Shape tools, work much like Photoshop’s Liquify panel; there are brushes to pinch and bloat areas of the body, increasing or decreasing size. Again, these work fine, and the tools can be move through using Tab and altered in size with shortcuts ([ and ] for size and 9 and 0 for strength); Shift temporarily switches to an alternate tool, for example toggling Expand and Contract. All good there. Next is Skin, which automatically picks up skin tones. If there’s lots of contrast between skin tone and background it works fine, but I found it easily fooled if the backdrop was similarly warm in colour. It did okay with darker skin tones, and there are tools to add and remove from skin selection. Smoothing can be done using a slider, and a modest amount seemed to look pretty good. Fixing blemishes is brush based, and worked well again. There’s also the facility to swap belly buttons from a built in library; it worked okay, though I suspect will be a bit far formost people. The Face options use similar, though

Overall, the simpler the backdrop the easier it is to make an adjustment