What makes Retouch4me so impressive? It works in Photoshop and it's simple, fast, non-destructive, and editable.
Opening it in Photoshop reveals a simple panel with 11 separate plugins (more to come in the future). Select one or all of them and click "run" and in a few seconds Retouch4me will create individual layers for every edit that allows you to adjust each to your liking.
Each one of these plugins is sold separately which allows you to only pay for the ones you need. Some photographers may want them all but many won't need them. For example, the "clean backdrop" plugin is incredible for those of you who shoot in the studio and need help cleaning up wrinkled paper or footprints on a white floor, but location photographers would have no need for it.
The only flaw I can see with this software is the price: it was extremely expensive. Each plugin costs over $100 and if you buy them all you'll spend close to $1,000. This may be an easy decision for a full-time retoucher but for the average photographer, it's an extremely high price to pay.
Watch the video above to see me testing each of the plugins. As always, don't buy anything yet. Try it out for free and if you like it you can save 20% by using this link.
RT4ME changed the way I do retouching. It truly is THE BEST. Use it for every portrait I shoot.
That said, they don't have automatic updates, and in order to see updates, you have to be on..Reddit..!
That part sucks, really bad, because it means you won't know when updates happen and you might be missing out on features or better results.
Yeah, it does suck they don't have any kind of notifications when there's an update. But, instead of Reddit, you can just go directly to their site and look at the version or updated date.
That's a new thing on their site. I made a point about this on one of the companies Reddit posts, because that didn't use to exist.
Just fyi, with the promo link, looks like they are giving a 30% discount instead of 20%.
Seems pretty good. Seems they made not cloud reliant where you pay per image like some others that were reviewed. Overall that means a user with a decent GPU could technically do a photo shoot, and just have the plugin batch process all of the images just to see what it can do with them if it could work with the photoshop actions and batch functions in adobe bridge.
If you've got a Radeon 580 or GTX 1060 or better, life is good. It's real heavy on general compute units, and does use a fair tear of VRAM in some instances. I use it with a Radeon 6800 and it's pretty awesome.
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$903.00 for the whole thing and they don't bother to send you update notices!? Seems like a company that simply doesn't care about service -- which is not a good sign for a long-term relationship.
It will all depend on how they plan to handle the sales, for example, will a lifetime license truly be one, or will it be a misleading life of the product type of thing where they try to pull a Filmora on customers, thus leaving people on super expensive software that will never be updated because the next update has a new primary version number.
A good amount of what it does can be done with the new masking tools in LR
Maybe in terms of masking, but, not in terms of doing the actual retouch/edit, which is the point of it all.
I used it for a few months now and I can say it is truly a game changer. I tried it on many different images and for studio work it is very good. In available light photography the skin tone sometimes struggles a bit to "interpret" which is the best color. But in studio images all the plugins really shine.
The licensing is a bit weird. I had a plugin that only works in Rosetta but then the Ret4me plugins registered a 2nd machine and sometimes behave weirdly. I wrote to the support and they advised me to turn of Rosetta mode for PS. Then everything worked again. I just have to do without the other plugin.
Other than that:
I just had a job with 40+ images with high end retouching. Mostly in studio environment with lots of skin retouching and background extensions and it saved me a lot of time. Especially the "Fabric" and "Clean backdrop" plugins.
Someone here said you could everything with the new masking tools in LR. Although I doubt it – but even if you could – for portraits I use C1P which renders colours out of the box better with their "ProStandard" profiles.
And if you have to do a lot of retouching of skin anyways I find LR to be more inaccurate with basic retouching – the new "remove tool" in PS is really good – and I cannot do background extensions and other complex stuff which I had to do.
And you can also use it with batch processing in PS with it if you have a high volume of photos. Piximperfect has a lot of actions that work together with it.
And I think it mostly works offline as well. You don't need an internet connection for ML functions. But I could be wrong.
Same. Process in Capture One, bring it into PS, batch it, go to lunch and come back when it's done.
Open the folder in bridge, and adjust the layers it makes in PS on a per-image basis. I had an on-location portrait and lifestyle job recently where day 1 we photographed about 30 people in 4 locations, and day 2 was office lifestyle. I was able to make 3 selects and retouch everyone from the first day's shoot in about 5 hours total.
It's amazing.