Pixiq

On January 14, 2011, Anthropics Software will introduce Portrait Professional 10, an update to it's amazingly useful portrait retouching software. If you purchase Portrait Professional 9 before that date, an upgrade to the new version is free. 

There are many enhancements in version 10, the two most important of which are:

1. Greatly improved and extended face sculpting. Portrait Professional is the only commercial photo editing software that is trained in human appearance, using literally thousands of photographs of people. Version 10 has been greatly enhanced both with a new learning algorithm and more training. The result is that the (subtle or not so subtle) reshaping of the face towards beauty is far better and more natural with a greater range than it was before, and works with a greater range of faces.

It's worth noting that improving the training of the software is now a constant ongoing, Anthropics has a number of staff dedicated to constantly adding to the training set, so as over the next year version 10 should get better and better. The constantly improving training set will be available to buyers of version 10 free , so V10 is a rare example of software that will simply get better over time, not just receive bug fixes.

In addition, there are now more controls on the face shaping including nose shortening, nose slimming, septum shortening, nose blobbiness reduction, new eye enhancement sliders and an 'exaggerate' beauty slider for those that want to tweak to the max. In short this core beautifying process has been greatly improved.

2. Significantly improved 'Clearskin 2' skin enhancing. Portrait Professional treats skin enhancement differently from other software. Instead of filtering the skin at the frequencies that skin defects are thought to occur, which can work reasonably well for small skin defects but falls down badly for larger defects, Portrait Professional grafts in real skin texture when it finds a defect, which both produces a more natural result and enables the software to deal far better with large defects such as acne, blown highlights and large greasy areas of skin. This 'Clear skin' skin enhancing functionality has been significantly improved in version 10 with a better blending the skin texture in alogrithm, a better choice of skin textures and a generally more natural result.

Other improvements in V10:

3. Better defect finding and edge finding 'intelligent' brushes

9. New restore glasses shape command