How far to go - what are you feelings?

Ok guys, I purchased Portrait Professional today, on sale in August for $49, and I'm now seeing what it can do. This was mostly motivated by necessity while editing the photos of a model I shot several weeks ago. I realize she probably should have used more MU to smooth out her skin, though amplified by my snafu of shooting most shots about 1 f-stop under (that's another story), and recovering it in PP.

Anyway - I'm using Portrait Professional and comparing the images below, you will see that it is not only doing its job in smoothing things out - successfully I feel - but also actually changes things... you can see that her lips and esp her nose have actually changed shape. (It may be a little hard to tell if you can't flip between windows where they're in the same location - try opening this thread in separate tabs and doing that.)

I think the final image looks good. But .... What are your feelings on this?? I'm a little lost as to what to feel.

I like the changes, and unless you have the original as a reference an pay really close attention is difficult to tell what was changed

I see the following:
the nose looks shorter and more curved up
the lips look fuller
the image colors looks warmer
skin smoother
eyes whiter
eyelashes are sharper
the mark on her nose from wearing the sunglasses is not fully corrected

Some things that make me wonder how are done when shooting portraits are ( this is perhaps the subject of a different thread)
how is it possible to get the soft look so appealing in a portrait ? is your focus a bit closer than the eyes ?
I always shoot focusing on the eyes and the results are very sharp but no so appealing

Hey GB,

I've had Portrait Professional for awhile now. I have PP 9.0 for Mac, so your GUI may be a little different, but:

If you look just to the right of the main tab title, you'll see a box marked "on". Clicking this box turns off all edits for that particular section. It's a great way to quickly go down the list and exclude the edits you don't want:

http://a.imageshack.us/img40/5908/slidersi.jpg

- Joe U.

They way the images appear in the thread it doesn't look like they changed the shape of her features that much, but once I copied them and pasted them on top of each other the difference was very noticeable. Some of the changes I like, others I'm not so thrilled with. The nose doesn't bother me at all, but the lip does. Over all I think the skin tones improved greatly, not to mention how smooth things are now. But like Armondo said, without the original to compare to the final PP'd image, nobody would ever notice the difference.

Armando,

Thanks for taking a look. That's definitely a good question there: sometimes soft looks better, but how does one know when, and how do you achieve it? I'm not sure that one-size-fits-all, as some models do look better sharp. I dont think the answer is short focusing either, but filters or post processing that softens the entire image.

Joe,

Thanks! I think that may indeed be it! I will try it when I get home. Sculpt is OK when you want it - and good for comparisons. But odd that they turn it on by default. Shows you what the world is coming too ... maybe plastic surgeons were consulted when they developed the app? (it's a British company if that makes any difference).

Mike,

Ha .. Yes, no one would know and I suspect even less would care. Most people would probably say If it makes her look better, Great. But is it distorting the truth too much? I know a model who said that when she sent her port to an agency that they wanted "Un-retouched" images. They probably have their own PP gurus who can do whatever they want, so they prefer to see what they're getting beforehand.

G

Worked like a charm, Joe! You just click that puppy off, kicks the surgeon out of the room...

On another note, here's an edit I just did of the corrected output. Probably not for everyone, but ............

G