not bad for under $35

I don't know if everyone has seen these ads on Facebook, or if its just those of us who have 'photography' listed as an interest who get to see them... I'm talking about the ads for Portrait Professional. I'd seen so many of them that the other day I gave in and checked it out. I downloaded the free trial version, and played with it a little bit. 

Portrait Professional is incredibly easy to use. Granted, I spend all day sitting in front of three monitors (yes, I'm up to three) working on some pretty complicated computer shit, so I may not be your average computer user, but still... trust me: easy. 

It's rather limited in what it does - it merely enhances what you have. If you're not wearing lipstick, it won't give you lipstick. It's not Photoshop. You can only enhance portraits, that's it. It's not Photoshop. That being said, Photoshop costs $700 and this costs under $35. For what it does, it's a pretty good deal.

I started off playing with two photos of myself that I liked - but in which I wasn't wearing makeup. (In the one with the dragonfly, I look pretty rough. I'd just woken up.) You can see that I wasn't able to fix my hair or give myself lipstick, although I definitely was able to make it look like I'd bothered to powder my nose before wandering in front of the camera.

Before and after: Me and my mom's dog, Brin
Before and after: Barely awake and playing with a dragonfly.
You can tell the program had some problems with my half-asleep squinty eyes.
Then I decided to see what it could do with a picture in which I already had on makeup. The picture below I took this morning before I left for work. (I dyed my hair last week...)
Before and after: Not too big of a difference. I'd say the biggest difference is definitely the eyes. They look like robot eyes to me (which being an oddball, I actually love).
Anyway, it's pretty fun to play with, and if you're an amateur photographer like myself (totally lacking the $700 for Photoshop), it's a super-cheap, super-easy alternative. And no, I'm not getting paid to write this or anything; I just thought it was fun to play with. And when I found out how cheap it was, I bought it. I'm the official photographer at an event at my workplace on Monday, and I expect I'll have plenty of subjects who'll want to be touched up a tad :-)

[Okay. I'm so over that whole not showing my face on my blog thing. I was still pretty crazy paranoid about certain people finding this blog back when I first started it, that I went so far as to blur out my face in photos. I'm over it. Besides, this place doesn't bear my name, so chances are slim they'd magically stumble upon it... but if they did, they'd probably know damn quick whose site it was, face or no face.]