Portrait Professional 11 offers even better ways to fix your ugliness

Anthropics Technology Ltd. on Wednesday pushed out a major update to its Portrait Professional "airbrushing" software, including new touch-up functionality, better handling of multiple faces in a single image, new face modeling and 3D skin processing, and much more.

There are a lot of solutions available to the consumer looking to gently touch-up photographs. Some are built into smartphones, some are available as freeware, some are available as plug-ins to common desktop software. It's all kid's stuff compared to Portrait Professional.

The software takes a two-dimensional portrait, and intelligently builds a wireframe of the face in the photograph. Then, the user can manipulate the photograph in the classic "airbrush" fashion, by clearing up imperfections, reshaping the subject, and altering color and composition.

In Version 11, there are a couple of very major and immediately noticeable improvements. Firstly, there is a new UI for the software, secondly, the automatic face detection has been improved, so the process of building the face wireframe is no longer as time-intensive as it was in previous versions. Also, there are improved face-shaping and slimming controls, a new Clearskin touch-up brush for removing spots, blemishes, and stray hairs, more sliders for face-shaping controls, and more automated touch-ups for common airbrushing tasks such as removing bags under the eyes or crow's feet, enhancing cheekbones, and "lip moistening."

In addition to the standalone version of Portrait Professional, the plug-in version, Portrait Professional Studio, has been upgraded to integrate all of these touch-up features into Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop Elements. Both the standalone and plugin versions can handle RAW image files.

It's powerful enough for professional portrait studios, but priced cheaply enough for anyone who wants to make their Match.com profile pic look a bit more appealing. Portrait Professional 11 is available for $39.95, and there is a free trial version for users looking to test it out.