Portrait Professional 9

Portrait Professional is a unique image-editing program, because instead of being a general painting program, it focuses purely on improving photographic portraits.

Simple tasks such as removing red-eye or boosting colours can be done in any image-editing program, but turning a half-decent photo into a professional-looking portrait is something that can require skill and many hours of hard work.

Portrait Professional makes magazine-quality results almost ridiculously easy to achieve: users don’t need to know anything about photo retouching.

Just point and click at the subject’s key facial features - eyes, nose, mouth, and so on - and the software will automatically examine the face and fix common problems.

These are not restricted to cleaning up blemishes: it can change lighting and tonal balance and offers more drastic alterations such as re-sculpting a face entirely.

Portrait Professional bases its adjustments on data taken from a large database of portraits.

Although the hard stuff is taken care of by the software itself, the final result is very much under the user’s control. Each adjustment can be individually tweaked using simple sliders, grouped into handy categories.

You have plain-English options such as Thin Wrinkles, Eye Widening and special tools specifically designed for dealing with hair.

Side-by-side before and after windows are displayed, so all you have to do is adjust the sliders until you achieve the desired result. If this sounds rather simplistic, it’s really testament to how well the interface has been designed.

It’s tremendously powerful and offers a fine level of control over even the smallest details without becoming intimidating for the beginner.

There's plenty of pop-up help to guide you along the way, so there will be no need to consult a manual. This latest version of the software is now even easier to use.

More controls have been added, but its re-vamped interface includes significantly more help and guidance, including pop-up windows showing visually the function of each slider. We found that with a little patience and restraint, some very impressive results are possible.

In addition to the new interface, version 9 adds many new features. It offers enhanced Clearskin skin-processing technology and the ability to work with subjects shot in profile, not just straight-on. Other improvements include a big speed increase - it now supports multi-core computers.

Portrait Professional 9 is a rare program, simultaneously powerful and easy to use.