How to deal with closed eyes in Portrait Pro

I have been experimenting with Portrait Pro retouching software. It speeds up the process of skin smoothing and other retouching adjustments as an alternative of doing them in Photoshop.

The workflow in Portrait Pro is very intuitive and the learning curve is not steep at all. However, there are a couple of features that took me some time to figure out.

For example, sometimes the subject has closed eyes, such as in the shot of my friends’ newborn daughter (see above), whom I met a couple of days ago. The problem is that Portrait Pro insists on creating the outlines of open eyes once you have followed the directions and identified the position of the corners of the eyes.

The solution is to follow the step-by-step guide and specify the corners of the eyes (this defines the general outline and the angle of the face) and skip the eye outline adjustment steps by pressing Spacebar repeatedly. After finishing refining of the nose, the mouth and the overall face outlines, simply toggle off the Eye Controls group of adjustments at the bottom right panel.

Another feature comes into play if you want to retouch a skin area, which is not a face. In order to do this, press “Enhance Skin Only” button at the initial interface, below the gender and age selection buttons and paint in the skin area. However, this button is not shown by default. In order to activate it, you need to start Portrait Pro not as a Photoshop or Lightroom plugin, but as a stand-alone application. Then go to Portrairpro > Preferences > General and check the “Show “Enhance Skin Only” Button” checkbox.

In general, I find that Portrait Pro works very well, but to avoid a cookie-cutter, filtered look, I prefer to apply its adjustments selectively, only to certain areas of the photo. This can be done either by using layers in Photoshop, as I described in this post, or within Portrait Pro by using a Restore Brush.