Skylum Launches Aperty, a Portrait Editor With AI Offering Fast Results

Skylum, who made quite a splash in the image editing space with Luminar and then Luminar Neo, is setting out to conquer portrait photography editing with Aperty. The company says it's aimed at professionals and serious near-professionals, and it will be available on November 7.

Formerly known as “Project Barcelona,” Skylum says Aperty sets a "new standard for the next generation of portrait retouching tools." By combining advanced AI technologies with state-of-the-art features, Aperty delivers unmatched precision and natural-looking results, making it the ideal choice for professional photographers who value time and quality.

Here Are the Features Included

• Face Mesh: Utilizing next-gen technology, Aperty processes up to 4,000 dots per face (more than 20 times compared to other photo editors on the market), ensuring that every edit is precise and accurately accounts for the depth and dimensions of the image.
• Face and Body Segmentation: Aperty's sophisticated segmentation technology detects up to 30 classes of face and body parts, allowing for highly detailed retouching and reshaping adjustments.
• Cutting-edge Synthetic Data Set Generation: Aperty’s AI models have been trained using synthetic data, ensuring that creators' original work remains secure and addressing some of the common concerns among photographers around privacy and intellectual property.

Other Key Features

• Skin Smoothing: Perfect for fashion or wedding photography, this feature smooths skin texture, preserving natural tones and details.
• Blemish Removal: Remove blemishes and other imperfections while preserving skin texture and permanent details. Remove or restore the freckles.
• Face/Body Skin Color Correction: Balances skin color seamlessly, enabling quick adjustments of red and green skin tones with a single slider. Effectively removes redness on the model’s face and green tones caused by improper lighting or shadows.
• Studio Light: A dynamic tool that enables users to set up artificial lighting sources and apply light textures during post-production. With the ability to create up to 5 light sources, users can place them anywhere in the image to craft the perfect scene.
• Presets/LUTs: Presets and LUTs allow users to edit and color-grade images in just a few clicks. Set an amount to apply and adjust the settings to achieve fine-tuned results.
• Masking: Use precise mask layers to create AI masks for people and backgrounds, or customize masks with brushes, gradients, or luminosity. Adjust edits per layer for full control.
• Makeup: Add blush, contour, and highlights in post-production. Fine-tune tone, amount, and feathering for a natural look. Aperty's Face Mesh and Segmentation technologies ensure perfect application.

Designed in collaboration with renowned portrait photographer Julia Trotti, Aperty specifically meets the needs of semi-pro and professional photographers by offering advanced editing features that streamline the workflow and deliver stunning, natural-looking results with ease.

Perfect one image according to your unique style, and easily apply the edits to the rest of the photoshoot series thanks to Aperty's batch processing capabilities. With AI-assisted retouching, photographers can edit smarter and faster, freeing up time to take on more projects, explore their creative ideas, and grow professionally.

Giving Aperty a Spin

I'm not a portrait photographer, spending most of my time on landscapes, but I found using Aperty a good experience. Icons are arranged pretty much in the order that matched my workflow, starting with cropping, basic image tools that you will find in other editors, like white balance, exposure, highlights, curves, saturation, sharpening, etc.

The next section deals with faces and bodies in your image, so blemish removal, freckles, skin smoothing, skin color correction, dark circle removal, face brightening, and skin shine removal.

Then there are options to enlarge or whiten eyes, adjust the mouth shape, and uniquely, apply makeup in post. Frankly, I thought that had a high potential for failure, but it worked well if you are subtle in its application. You can also apply eyeliner.

Then there's a reshape set of tools for face slimming and adjusting the body.

The last set of controls is for lighting, where you can adjust the direction of lighting, the hue of lighting, and even add some realistic light and shadow mixtures. This had great potential to be abused and look really bad, but here again, used carefully, it does add nice, naturalistic effects in post.

There's also Bokeh, to blur the background, and an assortment of LUTs, along with the ability to add film grain.

Aperty also includes an erase tool, and dodge and burn tools.

In using Aperty, I thought things worked quite well, and it was similar to the controls in Neo. I found a nasty bug in the Bokeh control as it left a visible line around my subject, and no adjustment I could find would eliminate it. As I was testing a beta, I expect it will be gone for the November release.

I tried a quick edit on a public domain portrait for the toning and lighting tools and thought it worked well. Here's the before:

And the after:

Didn't do much on the face, as it is a long shot, but I got a better image in the end. I did try some shots I've taken of friends and found the blemish removal tools robust and realistic. Face slimming was effective, but if you push any of the tools, you'll get images that look obviously retouched.

Some of the same tools are available in Luminar Neo, and it now becomes a companion program for Aperty, but the Neo tools are only a subset of the extensive tools in this new app.

Buying Aperty

From October 1 until the release date, Aperty is available at an early-bird price: a 1-year subscription plus 1 year free for $199/€179. After the launch on November 7, Aperty will be available at $29.90/€26.90 for a 1-month subscription or $299/€269 for a 1-year subscription. All plans include the latest version, 24/7 technical support, and activation on up to 2 devices.

By the end of September, there is an exclusive option to preorder a lifetime license for $249/€219, which includes 2 years of free upgrades and 5 years of updates. You can purchase online at the Skylum website.

Summing Up

Aperty looks like a powerful program, and the AI technology and the batch processing are going to be a real time saver for wedding photographers and others.

What I Liked

• Even in beta, the app performed well on an M3 Mac laptop.
• Aperty is easy to use, especially if you're familiar with Luminar Neo.
• There aren't many photographers who won't use every tool, or even most of them on every portrait, but they are there when you need them.

What Could Be Better

• I just hate, hate, hate subscription plans. I know the software companies like the revenue, but I'd really like to own my software.
• While powerful, I think Aperty is pricey.

Here's why. The competitive app in this space is the much-liked Portrait Pro 24 from Anthropics. It costs less ($59 on sale), is not a subscription, and has some unique features like reducing reflections in glasses and face reconstruction. If you add batch programming to Portrait Pro, it goes up to $179.99, which Aperty includes, but it's still less expensive than Aperty. The two programs overlap on most features, but there are things unique to both programs. From using both, I'd say Skylum is the most sophisticated in its use of AI, but Portrait Pro is very powerful. Check the feature set on both if you are in the market for a portrait editor.