Fast Portrait Editing using the ON1 Editor

Portrait photographers are always looking for ways to get editing done quicker, and most of them follow a standard recipe of what edits need to be done. Almost nobody wants to see their portrait that hasn’t been touched up to make themselves look a little bit better.

The ON1 editor has a special panel that’s dedicated to portraits. Using artificial intelligence, ON1 automatically recognizes the parts of face. The most tedious part of portrait editing is typically drawing the masks on the different parts of the face to make local adjustments, and this task is now automated.

ON1 lets you quickly move through the steps of almost everything that needs to be done to edit a portrait. In this article, I’ll show you how a typical editing session is carried out. I’m presently using the 2023 version of ON1.

The ‘Portrait AI’ panel with default settings

As you can see in the panel above, there are several editing options for the different parts of the face. But that’s not all…

Additional skin retouching options

When you expand the ‘Details’ option, there are controls to further refine how the face skin gets altered.

Portrait before editing (cropped)

Skin ‘Retouching’ set to 50 (left), 90 (right)

Most of the controls let you go beyond what you should set. The skin Retouching control seems about right at a setting of 50, but the setting of 90 starts looking artificial.

Face ‘Brightness’ 38 (left), 100 (right)

‘Slim Face’ 0 (left), 70 (right)

Slimming a face also alters the neck and above the shoulders, so that it's really hard to tell the portrait was altered.

Eye ‘Brightness’ 0 (left), 100 (right)

Eye ‘Whitening’ 0 (left), 60 (right)

The ‘Whitening’ control will let you reduce redness of the eyes.

Eye ‘Detail’ 0 (left), 40 (right)

Use this ‘Detail’ control to sharpen eye lashes and the iris. This feature doesn’t work as well as my Topaz Photo Studio or DeNoise, but you can’t beat how easy it is to use.

Eye ‘Dark Circles’ 0 (left), 100 (right)

Eye ‘Brow Enhance’ 0 (left), 60 (right)

Those brows start to look scary if they’re enhanced very much.

Teeth Whitening 0 (left), 60 (right)

Moderate teeth whitening is almost always a good thing. It’s usually unrealistic to totally remove all yellowing. In extreme cases, you might need to switch to the “Develop” panel and use the masking brush for the teeth to alter their color temperature toward blue.

Lip Vibrance 0 (left), 100 (right)

Additional Edits

You still might find a few things that need to be done outside of the Portrait panel, such as using the ‘Retouch Brush’ to rid strands of hair (inside the ‘Develop’ panel).

Finished portrait

Final settings in Portrait panel

Save the settings as a new ‘Style’

The ‘Style’ drop-down menu lets you save (or update) the settings as a new, named style. In this way, you can automatically apply these settings to other portraits. In the future, you could edit other portraits at lightning speed by simply selecting a saved portrait style.

Summary

If you’re looking for an editor that will let you retouch portraits with maximum convenience, the ON1 editor is hard to beat. Please keep in mind that a properly edited portrait shouldn’t look like it has been edited!