By Jay Nelson

Perfect Portrait 1 (US$99.95) from onOne Software (http://www.ononesoftware.com) is a huge timesaver for portrait photographers. It automatically identifies faces and features, and with a press of a button, eyes become whiter and clearer, teeth become whiter, lips have greater definition, wrinkles are softened, and shine and blemishes are reduced. In addition, color casts can be improved, based on the ethnicity of each face in the photo.

Age- and gender-specific presets give you a headstart for many common problems. Then, sliders let you adjust every improvement, and manual tools let you paint away stray hairs, blemishes, and wrinkles. (Wacom tablet features are supported.) When you find a combination of settings that work, you can save them as your own preset for use on other photos. I found the presets to be tremendously useful, requiring only a few tweaks of the sliders to get my ideal result.

Brushes let you fine-tune the auto-generated masks for face, eyes, and mouth, which is essential for some photos. Unfortunately, undoing a brush stroke requires multiple presses of Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z), and you cannot save your masks for future adjustment. I recommend using the auto-mask feature on photos you show your clients, and fine-tuning the masks for your final candidates.

Perfect Portrait works either as a standalone program or as a plug-in to Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, or Apple’s Aperture. In Photoshop, it can be applied as a smart filter for later editing—otherwise it adds a new layer. In Lightroom and Aperture, adjustments can be applied to multiple images at once.

Rating: 7 out of 10

(This review is brought to you courtesy of "Layers Magazine": http://layersmagazine.com/ .)