Plug-In Review: Imagenomic Portraiture for Video

Imagenomic cut their virtual teeth by algorithmically massaging faces in still photographs to cleanse them of blemishes and otherwise give them a clean, youthful glow. For many wedding and studio photographers, the photo plugin is their go-to retouching tool. Now, Imagenomic has embarked on a more ambitious task: to apply the same automatic facial retouching to video. We spent some time using Portraiture for Video in tandem with David Patiño, a Northern New Jersey-based photographer and director, to see whether they could pull it off.

Imagenomic’s Portraiture for Video is available as a plug-in for the major video editors for a $99 annual subscription. Photos courtesy of Imagenomic

PLUGGED IN
Portraiture for Video works as a plug-in for most of the high-end video-editing titles on the market, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas Pro and DaVinci Resolve. It’s available for a 15-day free trial after which it’s an annual subscription of $99 a year.

The software will work on any of the video formats natively supported by your video editor of choice. We tested Portraiture in Adobe Premiere Pro CC using CinemaDNG and ProRes 422 files captured with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. We also tested AVCHD footage from a JVC video camera.

Anyone familiar with Premiere Pro will have no trouble navigating the Portraiture toolset. Upon installation, Portraiture will appear in the effects library and behave like any of Premiere’s other baked-in effects tools. Simply drag and drop Portraiture onto the clip you wish to edit and make further adjustments in Premiere’s Effects Control pane.

When you apply the Portraiture plug-in, you’ll have the option of adjusting the smoothing effect either by keying in a value from 1 to 100 directly or by expanding a window to access a slider. We found the sliders much more intuitive when starting out because it took us a while to understand what Portraiture’s numbers corresponded to in terms of image effects. Next to every option you’ll have the usual “reset parameter” option to scurry back to the default setting.

While Portraiture’s default smoothing setting comes on a bit strong, you can use tools such as masking to fine-tune its effects.

UP IN YOUR FACE
We were curious to see how well Portraiture could identify and retouch faces on the fly, and how well it could handle the boundaries between skin, hair and clothing. For the former, the plug-in worked flawlessly. Patiño pulled up some video he had edited of a fashion shoot hosted in a mall. We chose the clip because we felt it was particularly challenging, not just for the number of faces, but for the variety of skin tones and types it threw at Portraiture in rapid succession. Models strutted on the catwalk and passersby streamed through the frame. Portraiture was able to identify all of these rapidly moving mugs and apply its retouch to them instantly.

The first thing Patiño relayed about his time with the software was that it “really nailed” wide-open areas of skin. Things got a bit messier at the boundary between skin and hair, or clothing that resembles a skin tone. In one close-up of a model with bleached-blonde hair, we noticed the default effect of Portraiture cannibalized detail in the hair and blurred-out texture in the clothing.

This is largely due to how aggressive the default “smoothing” setting is. Out of the gate, Portraiture applies smoothing at 50 percent, and it’s immediately apparent. Patiño liked that the program comes on strong because “you know it’s working.” But this default is probably far more than you need on even the most—ahem—deserving of faces. When you crank the smoothing up above the 50-percent default, you rapidly lose facial details and it starts to looks like you smeared Vaseline over your subject’s face.

Suffice it to say, Portraiture is not a one-click fix, and, unlike the still version of the program, there are no presets. At a minimum, you’ll likely find yourself dialing back the smoothing effect to a more modest range of 10 to 20 percent and taking advantage of Portraiture’s other controls, such as masking, warmth, tint and contrast control to refine the effect. This means you may want to be selective, reserving Portraiture for close-ups where you can dial it into just one or two faces. Fortunately, this is easy enough to do.

Portraiture’s overall performance and stability also impressed us. We tested it on Patiño’s 2013 MacBook Pro (2.6GHz Intel Core i5 with 8GB of RAM) and our 2013 Mac Mini (2.6GHz Core i7 with 16GB RAM). Neither would qualify as hardcore video-editing computers, yet both rendered the plug-in’s effects with ease.

About the only serious hang-up we had was the pricing structure. Like a growing number of software companies, Imagenomic wants you to pay an annual fee for access to Portraiture. To Patiño—who counts the still version of the program as his go-to facial retouching tool and was very impressed with this opening foray into video—the $99 annual subscription seemed a little high for a single-purpose plug-in. At the very least, it would have been nice to have the option to purchase or subscribe.

BOTTOM LINE
This isn’t the tool for the videographer invested in gritty realism or unearthing the human face in all its pockmarked glory. It is ideal for those whose clients include weddings, corporate spokespeople, politicians or anyone looking for just a little bit of relief from the not-so-tender mercies of high-resolution digital video. We only wish you had the option to purchase it outright.

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