FIGURE C

It crashed. That's not good. Click picture for a larger image.

The crash occurred as we were closing the Portraiture window. Now, to be fair, after a lot of play with Portraiture, it only crashed once. And, it only crashed after we were doing a whole lot of torture testing.

We took the photo of a lizard and decided to see if Portraiture could remove the big bumps on the reptile's skin. We fiddled with masks. We moved the sliders all around. Changed colors, tried previewing a ton of different ways. And, to be fair, Portraiture's meant to clean up human skin, not creepy, crawly creatures.

But, still, it crashed.

Our evaluation and recommendation
At $169, Portraiture's more of a product for a pro or a serious amateur. If you've got a lot of pictures you want to clean up, or if you doubt your own artistic skills touching up photos in just the right way, Portraiture's definitely something you should get.

But what about the crash and what's our final numeric rating? Were Portraiture not to have caused a crash, we would have rated it a solid four out of five. But our published rating guidelines are very specific. To get a rating of four, the product has to be "nearly perfect".

Our rating system also says that a "product that crashes from time to time" gets only a two. Fortunately, we only saw one crash, and never on images the program was designed to handle. It doesn't seem fair to give such a helpful product a rating of two, especially since the "time to time" criteria wasn't true.

So, we're going to split the difference and give Portraiture three beautiful faces out of five. Know that it's really a four-star product without the crash, the company's likely to fix bugs like this and update the product, and we strongly recommend it to you if you have a need for this kind of retouching automation.

We reviewed version 1.0.1 of the product. Check with the company when you're ready to buy and see if they have a later release.

OUR RATING: 3 of 5

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and can be reached via email at david@zatz.com.