[admin]

One feature we have been mulling over adding to a future version (v10 or later) of Portrait Professional is body sculpting. Body sculpting would work in a similar way to our face sculpting. You would have to mark out key points on the body, then you would get interactive sliders to change the body shape; longer legs, thinner waist, bigger/higher boobs etc. If we got it working well, it should be a lot faster and less difficult than trying to do it using liquify. Out of our current users we would be very interested in hearing if you thought this would be a useful feature or whether you would rather we spent our time on other things.

[macs mom]

Yes! Sometimes you really need a quick nip in at the waistline, or pull out the calves of the legs a little more on someone who is really skinny. Also, sometimes a male model with very narrow shoulders would look a bit better with slightly broader shoulders. I think the high points, Shoulders, Chest, Biceps, Waist, Hips, Thighs and Calves...would be great if we could slightly alter.

[admin]

If you want it, or don't want it, don't forget to vote!

[Roscoe]

If you are employed by the likes of Playboy, Penthouse etc. and are the one responsible for the "air brushing" of your subject matter to (a) appeal to the readers or (b) to boost the egos of the pinups then a body sculpting tool would be really useful. However, if PP had a body sculpting tool and I (for example) "body sculpted" my wife/daughter/girlfriend I think they would be insulted if I sculpted them to look like what I wanted instead of what they actually look like.
Having said that, PP would be more useful with the added function. PP works pretty well with animals (cats & dogs) and inanimate objects (cars, trees etc) it just needs a bit of experimentation is all.

[fiona-w]

I voted for more important 'other features' - batch processing is top of my wish list.

Regards,

Fiona

[Roscoe]

I think batch processing would be nigh on impossible considering the way PP works. Say you had 10 portrait photographs, each a different subject (male/female/adult/child) and each portrait taken different distances from the camera, then the parameters PP uses to modify the pictures (eye/nose/lips/cheeks/temples etc) would be in a different position in each photograph.
Batch processing is easily done if, for example, you're changing a bunch of jpegs to bmps or wav to mp3, because the files are of uniform construction. It's also easy to achieve if you're applying the actions of a plugin/action to a lot of graphic files.

[fiona-w]

I agree that under the wide ranging subject examples you refer to, there would be huge difficulties in batch processing - but I work on  many similar head shot portraits of a subject taken in very quick succession. For each sitting, the person and  lighting are the same; the head angle is either the same or similar to the previous shot but the expression has changed a little (perhaps the lips have opened or the smile widened etc). For people like me, the ability to retain the previous photos PP eye/nose/mouth selection points (with the option to tweak them slightly) would be a godsend! If you improve the skin/eyes/teeth on one shot then obviously you have to do them all ...

I tried Anthropics Portrait Plus back in 2007 as detailed here:-

http://www.portraitprofessional.com/Foru...hp?tid=163

but as you were charged for each shot processed (and at that stage it was quite buggy) this was way too expensive for me. I'd have much prefered to have been able to buy the package outright. I don't know what the position with Portrait Plus is today - perhaps Admin can tell us?

Regards,

Fiona.

[admin]

Hi Everyone,

Version 9 of Portrait Professional Studio is going to have a kind of batch processing in it. In it, you will be able to select a set of files and process them as usual without having to go via the open and save dialogs each time. This should save some time when processing many files. We are also planning to do a completely automatic solution sometime in the future, but currently we are not sure if the technology is good enough. As for tweaking earlier point placements; it's an interesting idea, however it would require some cunningness to ensure it was actually faster using the previous points as a starting point.

Tony

[fiona-w]

Hi Tony,

Any means of saving repetition would be extremely welcome. Plus the option for us to say 'reapply point placements from previous photo' would be a HUGE timesaver for portrait photographers like me. I've attached some photos to try and show what I mean.

   
   
   
   

Regards,

Fiona.

PS sorry, not sure how to make the pics appear larger than thumbnails ...

[admin]

Thanks Fiona. These photos illustrate what I meant by being cunning before; although the shots are all very similar, if you flip between them you can see that in fact every single point changes from one shot to the next. Not that it means you can't use the previous shot, but simply recycling points wouldn't work.

Tony