Mario Giannini
Senior Member
I have purchased and using the PortraitPro product from Anthropics, and I was extremely pleased with it's interface, usability, flexibility, and results. So much so, that I purchased the LandscapePro product without even a trial. I am very sorry I did that.
The interface starts with you tagging things with push pins like Sky, Tree, Building, Grass, Person, etc. As you do, it starts to build a mask of the various objects.
After the tagging, you are brought to a section that displays the masks for the various objects where you can expand and manipulate sections. I dislike this part as I have seen parge patches of sky and grass not be automatically masked correctly and I have to refine them. While some of the interfaces are unique and interesting, the task becomes tedious to adjust obvious sections, sometimes with sections switching or 'bleeding' into others sections (during expand) to much or expanding to little.
Then you define the horizon, which I think would be ok, but I rarely had a perfect horizon (Grand Canyon land formations, tree lines, mountains, houses, etc.
After this, you are brought to the area where you can then manipulate each of the sections. You can apply presets to the entire image like Middat, night, dusk, disturbance, and so on, and you can also apply presets to the the various objects like Tree, Sky, etc. You can also adjust sliders for a custom appearance on the objects,
Most of these presets are adjusting basic things like contrast, fill light, saturation, temperature, etc. In a typical example, the 'Grass' object adjustments allow you to pick from 6 presets like Lush, Cold, Dry, etc. And for the most part these features work and present that feel. If you then switch to the sliders, you get 12 sliders to control Levels and Colors adjustments. In other words, most of the presets are shifts in color temp, tint, saturation, and contrast.
I tried the plugin on several different styles of photos such as Grand Canyon shots (yeah, select the 'rock' objects vs grass in those), Pennsylvania Farm lands, scenic hikes, and others. In just about every case, I found the object identification/selection process to be intuitive, but tedious and confusing (sometimes it hinted that I only needed to select one tag for things like 'sky', but then it only masked half the sky).
Then in the adjustments phase, the presets seemed mostly over-done in my personal opinion, and not terribly useful. I keep wanting to call them science fiction filters. While things like the Lighting adjustments works pretty well in their portrait product, it just seems wierd here (things like a building roof would be half-lit and half-shaded, but the original image had no (and would have no) shadow on a complete slide.
In the end, what I found was that most of my images were improved by some very simple adjustments with exposure, contrast, saturation and temperature WITHOUT using this product. After several weeks of using, I have yet to find an image I think it improved that I couldn't do old school quicker and easier.
You should download a trial (if available) before you purchase and try it on existing images before committing to the purchase. I think a very few people will find a very few select photos that this product will improve in in a manner quicker and easier than what they probably already have.
The interface starts with you tagging things with push pins like Sky, Tree, Building, Grass, Person, etc. As you do, it starts to build a mask of the various objects.
After the tagging, you are brought to a section that displays the masks for the various objects where you can expand and manipulate sections. I dislike this part as I have seen parge patches of sky and grass not be automatically masked correctly and I have to refine them. While some of the interfaces are unique and interesting, the task becomes tedious to adjust obvious sections, sometimes with sections switching or 'bleeding' into others sections (during expand) to much or expanding to little.
Then you define the horizon, which I think would be ok, but I rarely had a perfect horizon (Grand Canyon land formations, tree lines, mountains, houses, etc.
After this, you are brought to the area where you can then manipulate each of the sections. You can apply presets to the entire image like Middat, night, dusk, disturbance, and so on, and you can also apply presets to the the various objects like Tree, Sky, etc. You can also adjust sliders for a custom appearance on the objects,
Most of these presets are adjusting basic things like contrast, fill light, saturation, temperature, etc. In a typical example, the 'Grass' object adjustments allow you to pick from 6 presets like Lush, Cold, Dry, etc. And for the most part these features work and present that feel. If you then switch to the sliders, you get 12 sliders to control Levels and Colors adjustments. In other words, most of the presets are shifts in color temp, tint, saturation, and contrast.
I tried the plugin on several different styles of photos such as Grand Canyon shots (yeah, select the 'rock' objects vs grass in those), Pennsylvania Farm lands, scenic hikes, and others. In just about every case, I found the object identification/selection process to be intuitive, but tedious and confusing (sometimes it hinted that I only needed to select one tag for things like 'sky', but then it only masked half the sky).
Then in the adjustments phase, the presets seemed mostly over-done in my personal opinion, and not terribly useful. I keep wanting to call them science fiction filters. While things like the Lighting adjustments works pretty well in their portrait product, it just seems wierd here (things like a building roof would be half-lit and half-shaded, but the original image had no (and would have no) shadow on a complete slide.
In the end, what I found was that most of my images were improved by some very simple adjustments with exposure, contrast, saturation and temperature WITHOUT using this product. After several weeks of using, I have yet to find an image I think it improved that I couldn't do old school quicker and easier.
You should download a trial (if available) before you purchase and try it on existing images before committing to the purchase. I think a very few people will find a very few select photos that this product will improve in in a manner quicker and easier than what they probably already have.
