iCorrect Portrait 2

[Andrew B.]

I last posted about iCorrect Portrait in 2013. At the time I mentioned that there was a new version available. Shortly after that I upgraded. And since then I've used the new version. But I'm not really an avid Photoshopper anymore. From time to time I see a photo online and wonder how it would look if I tweaked it, and that's about it.

Anyway, with version 2.0 they added noise reduction and sharpening. They might as well have left them out. I don't find them useful in any way. But, over the past 5 years I've become more impressed with it's older features as follows:

1. Skin tone correction is the best I've seen. But I found I cannot simply click on any area of skin tone. The skin tone in a photo varies because highlights and shadows. Not to mention that fact that skin tone can vary all by itself. So to get best results one might have to click and undo to test different spots.

2. For making quick and easy brightness adjustments, it's brightness slider is better than the one in Photoshop. These days brightness sliders (including Photoshop's) do not simply increase brightness. They selectively brighten so the photo's shadows don't become a washed out mess, and so you don't need to use another tool such as Levels or Curves to compensate for this. iCorrect has the better algorithm for this.

3. The black point adjustment is useful. It's a check box. The white point adjustment is not as impressive. But not useless.

4. The point and click color cast removal tool is useful.

One thing to keep in mind is that their "correction" feature doesn't actually give you the subject's correct skin color. What it does is adjust the skin tone so it looks more natural. And in doing so it also affects non-skin parts of the photo. Also, whether you apply hue removal before or after skin adjustment makes a difference. But then again, just leave it to me to complicate a simple task.

So now I'll add the bottom line. This is a very useful tool. It continues to impress me.

BTW, in a 2005 post I mentioned that iCorrect Portrait is actually an earlier product called iCorrect Professional, except with the sky and foliage features removed. And for years I fretted about the fact that I didn't buy it when these features were there. Well, it finally dawned on me to email them and ask for the color definitions. And they sent them. So now I can load those any time I want to do sky or foliage. Except, I'm too lazy to do this, so I never use those features. And if memory serves me, they never worked as well as the skin tone feature.