PT Portrait - Studio Edition

Composing photos to emphasize the most flattering angles for their subjects and especially choosing the perfect lighting setting are issues that portrait photographers have to take into account more than others.

Regardless of you shooting studio or using natural light, photos can almost always be enhanced with post-editing. The same goes for all subjects, who might have skin imperfections or some sort of facial trait that can be improved.

PT Portrait - Studio Edition is a user-friendly yet powerful piece of software designed from the ground up to enhance your portrait photography by enabling you to remove or correct imperfections.

In other words, the editor enables you to fix skin imperfections by smoothing and improving the tone, brighten eyes, enhance eyebrow's shape, whiten teeth and retouch lips, just to get started.

Regardless of your former experience with photo editors, learning to use the tool is not at all problematic, as it comes with a very intuitive interface. As is the case of most photo editors nowadays, the program simplifies the whole editing process thanks to its collection of easy to operate sliders.

As expected, most of the work implies that you drag the sliders and compare the before and after results using a live preview panel. Exceptions are those few times when you probably want to use the brushes and manually apply masks for more in-depth editing.

But by far the best thing about PT Portrait - Studio Edition is how it manages to streamline the whole facial editing process. Yes, most other photo editors out there can do most of what this app can do, but in no way are they easier to use.

Once you load a portrait picture, the app guides you through an intuitive setup phase, which helps you have better control over the editing process later on.

By undergoing its three-stage editing process (Fitting, Makeover and Reshape), you can make your subjects look more attractive, by reshaping their face.

You can slim faces, enlarge eyes, lift eye corners, make the nose smaller and improve smiles. You can adjust the photo at an overall level, by adjusting the exposure, contrast, saturation, colors cast levels.

To conclude, by using PT Portrait - Studio Edition you should not expect Photoshop-level editing. Whereas full-featured photo editors do not have a lean learning curve, this app seems like it has none, is that simple to use.

Yes, it might not suit the needs of professional portrait photographers out there, but it is perfectly aimed at novices and intermediates who want to edit portraits with the least amount of effort.

Nevertheless, with a fair bit of carefulness and without overly exaggerating the level of editing done to your subjects, you can achieve surprisingly good results.