Today we are reviewing an editing software that is aimed at professionals, but suited for entry-level photographers and hobbyists alike. I’m talking about Aperty, a new AI software from the folks behind Luminar Neo. And, no, Luminar is not going anywhere! Aperty is a very specialized software that is all about portraits. (Considering how many landscape & travel photographers love Luminar Neo, I think it’s safe to say that both programs will coexist beautifully!)
In today’s Aperty review, I’m going to dive into exactly what this retouching software can do, how you can use it to save a lot of time in your post-production workflow, and of course its value as an investment whether you are a pro or more casual photographer.
What Is Aperty?
Aperty is an AI portrait editor, a software that is a standalone portrait editing application, but also has plugins for Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Apple / macOS Photos.
In other words, your entire post-production workflow could take place in Aperty! Also, the retouching process is assisted by AI. The job of meticulous, tedious subject selection, masking, warping, cloning, etc is totally streamlined, while still offering extensive creative control to the artist.
Here’s a hint of what we’ll cover more in-depth: Not only are the results very professional, but also, the Aperty software itself is user-friendly and intuitive. So, pros will be very happy with the performance and the overall reliability & speed of the app, and beginners will find the learning curve to be very easy, too.
Aperty is available for both macOS (12 or newer) and Windows, (10 or newer) and can also integrate into your Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop workflow using its plugins. It is not particularly CPU or graphics-intensive; the specifications list an 8 GB RAM minimum, (16 GB recommended) …and any relatively current graphics card.
Aperty Review | Features
We’ll dive deeper into each of these features next, but to start, here is a list of just how extensive Aperty is if you’re working with portrait photos:
- Facial Recognition
- Facial Retouching
- Skin Blemish Removal
- Skin Softening
- Body Skin Retouching
- Face Shape Control/Contouring
- Makeup
- Contouring
- Blush
- Highlighting
- Eyeliner
- Studio Lighting Adjustments
- Light direction & softness control
- Light texture/pattern tools
- Color Correction (White balance, exposure, contrast, curves, HSL, vignetting/optics, etc)
- Presets
- LUTs
- Cropping
- Culling
Aside from this list of tools, there is one key feature that brings them all together: batch processing! This feature will likely save you the most time of all, because you will be cutting way back on the amount of time that you ever have to spend on any particular face in an entire photo shoot!
Aperty VS Luminar Neo | Which One Is Right For You?
This is a comparison that you are very likely to be making, whatever type of photographer you are! The key difference is of course, how much portrait photography do you do? If the answer is, “not much”, then you are much more likely to be perfectly happy with Luminar Neo only.
However, if you do a lot of portrait photography, let alone, portraits exclusively, I would shift to recommending Aperty first, and then considering Luminar Neo later. For example, if you do a lot of portrait photography, but you’re also interested in some of the advanced tools such as HDR processing or panorama stitching, then, yes, you’ll likely want to own both programs.
Also, it is important to note that although Aperty does offer enough workflow tools for culling, (flagging keepers or rejects) as well as basic color-correction, it is not the same type of catalog organization tools that Luminar Neo has. In fact, you can only view your images in “light box” or “filmstrip” mode within Aperty. Therefore, having Luminar Neo to keep your whole portfolio organized is definitely a good idea.
Thankfully, purchasing both programs still offers a strong value, because Lumiar Neo is . (We’ll talk more about pricing later…)
Aperty Review | Main Benefits & How To Use Them
The awesome thing we loved about trying out and reviewing Aperty was this: there is almost no learning curve! Simply put, you’ll do virtually zero selection or local brush work, and that is a breath of fresh air, indeed. Not only does it make using Aperty easy and “less technical, more fun!” …but it also will result in tons of time saved, too.
Facial Recognition
The first step in the process is virtually automatic: just let Aperty use its AI to recognize faces in your portrait photos! It will differentiate between faces, even, so that later when it is time to batch edit multiple photos, the software will know which faces to apply which edits to. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves…
Skin Blemish Removal, Skin Softening, Body Skin Retouching
The flagship features of Aperty are definitely its various retouching tools. Indeed, one of the biggest time-saving benefits that the AI is giving us is, simply put, no more tedious eye-fatigue from hours of carefully selecting, feathering, masking, and cloning/warping every little detail on a person’s face! This is one AI tool that even the most talented retouchers will inevitably appreciate, because it honestly just isn’t good for your eyesight to have to squint at fine details on a computer screen for hours on end.
With that being said, you should be asking, “does it actually work?” The answer is yes! The AI facial recognition in Aperty does a pretty impressive job of identifying each part of a face, and identifying blemishes on skin.
The result is elegant and efficient: Sliders control all the different types of retouching needs you might have, for skin blemish removal, (or freckles removal, although we’d call those beautiful and not “blemishes”!) …and overall smoothing.
As with virtually all retouching techniques, we recommend being cautious and not overdoing it with any particular slider, usually. In almost every sample image that we fed into Aperty, we felt perfectly comfortable with the results with the various sliders (as needed) somewhere in the middle, or just on the lighter side of ~50/100.
Eye Retouching & Eyebag Removal
This is honestly one of the most perfect retouching tools we’ve ever seen; it just gets this right without any help or errors! This feature alone is worth the price of admission. This slider isn’t in the “Eyes” section, by the way, it’s in the “Face Skin” tab, under “Dark Circles Removal”. Either way, just dial this slider to somewhere between 25-50 as a default, and apply it to virtually every single one of your portraits! I would at least save this as a preset, and I even wish that Aperty allowed you to set a new default, actually!
In addition to retouching around eyes, of course, there are many tools for enhancing the eyes themselves: Iris enhancement, whitening, size, redeye removal, …and a general “enhancement” slider.
Mouth Retouching
Here is another retouching effect that you should probably just add to your “default preset” at a low slider amount, for almost every portrait. Most adults’ smiles could use just a little bit of whitening/brightening! I will again note that this tool works amazingly well at making its selections very carefully, to affect teeth yet not lips, Having said that, this is one area where I should point out that if the AI doesn’t trace its lines perfectly, then you’ll simply have to keep the effect at a lower level, because Aperty does not offer options to manually trace out facial features. (This probably won’t be an issue for 99% of the portraits you edit, but it’s worth mentioning.)
Makeup
Adding makeup is something that you should always discuss with your portrait clients; you don’t want to do anything that they know they didn’t do, and/or were not expecting! With that being said, the makeup tools in Aperty are a very efficient way to narrow down hours of retouching work into a few seconds/minutes!
In the “Retouch” main sidebar menu, look for the “Make Up” tab, (at the bottom of the list) and simply adjust the sliders to your taste.
Face Shape Adjustment (Sculpting)
This is where things get delicate, and any portrait retoucher would advise you to proceed carefully! Again, the tools Aperty offers work very well; you just need to be careful not to overdo them.
Individually, you can adjust the position and shape/size of almost everything from eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth.
You’ll find these tools in the next-down main sidebar, under “Retouch”: Look for the “Reshape” menu. We recommend skipping most of these specialized tools unless you have specifically discussed their use with your clients/subjects.
Studio Lighting Adjustments
One of the final key features that we greatly value with Aperty is the Studio Lighting. If you want to take any portrait to the next level, as either a hobbyist or an aspiring professional, it’s all about controlling your light! However, it’s not always possible to spend a ton of time setting up the perfect lighting for every portrait you capture, of course. In fact, in many scenarios, it can be impossible or impractical to set up any lighting at all!
With this in mind, as much as we love setting up dramatic, beautiful lighting for our portraits, we also welcome this post-production tool. Whenever we capture a portrait in soft or “flat” lighting, or whenever we simply want to “clean up” the light in a photo, we can add a subtle bit of directional light using this tool in Aperty.
You can control not only the location of the light source, but many other settings such as its brightness, depth, color, and saturation. Additionally, you can apply custom patterns to the light itself, so for example you can mimic the mottled light of foliage outdoors, or the sharp edged light of blinds etc. indoors.
Additional Features in Aperty
Aside from the AI portrait retouching tools that are specifically designed for editing faces, Aperty does offer a comprehensive editing interface for the rest of your usual workflow.
To begin with, you can of course edit your main settings such as WB, Exposure, and tone control. (Curves etc) You can also apply cropping, optical corrections, sharpening, and more. You can
Finally, as we mentioned earlier, you have a few general workflow tools such as flagging (“keepers” or “rejects”) and the ability to seamlessly move between Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and/or Apple’s Photos app.
Performance, Reliability, Value
Here is something that can give you a lot of peace-of-mind, especially if you are a professional who is being trusted to capture, edit, and securely deliver portraits of other people: The AI in Aperty is on-device, so your image data is not seen by any cloud-based AI or other humans, and editing does not require an internet connection.
Also, as a general experience, we can say that the application simply runs very smoothly, is responsive and fast to process images overall. Sometimes it takes a few seconds to update your edit preview, if you’re really trying to crank through a lot of edits, rapid-fire. Other than that, it’s snappy and smooth operating.
For any pro photographer with a heavy workload, this final piece of the puzzle is indeed very critical when it comes to the value that you’ll receive for your investment.
Aperty Review | Conclusion
We have run a portrait and wedding photography studio for over 15 years now, and in that time, the retouching process has come a very long way! What is possible today in Aperty would have required highly advanced skills, and a serious investment in time, just a few years ago.
If anything, using Aperty is almost too easy. In other words, the tools are amazing, but we are a little oldschool and could actually use just a bit more control; for example, there isn’t a tool for manually selecting individual blemishes; we are looking forward to seeing if an update includes the Luminar Neo “Erase” tool. (Another thing we would like to see in a future update is the ability to specify which settings are saved in a preset.)
Aperty is absolutely going to save us tons of time, likely entire days per month! So, with that in mind, and considering the advantages as well as the drawbacks, we strongly recommend this as the best AI portrait editing app for professional photographers.
Aperty AI Software Pricing
Aperty can be purchased either as a monthly or an annual subscription. Currently, there is no option to purchase the software as a one-time perpetual license.
- Monthly Subscription: $29.99/mo.
- Annual Subscription: $299/yr.
For more information, visit the Aperty website!
