Skylum’s Luminar Neo is full of innovative, AI-powered photo editing tools. With Aperty, the company applies this expertise to portrait editing, collaborating with prolific photographer Julia Trotti. In addition to its people-focused face correction, filter, and masking features, Aperty provides most of the color, geometry, noise reduction, and organization tools we expect from a full-fledged photo editing application. It’s somewhat expensive and lacks some cutting-edge AI tools, however, so the more comprehensive Adobe Photoshop ultimately remains our Editors’ Choice winner for image editing.
How Much Does Aperty Cost?
Aperty targets professional portrait photographers and has a price to match. You can use it on a monthly basis for $19.95 or pay $199 up front for a full year. Subscribers get continuous updates. An additional option is to pay $399 for a perpetual license, with the option to upgrade to new features for $99 with auto-renewal and $119 without. You can activate the software on two devices, and 24/7 tech support is available for everyone. A 7-day free trial is available.
For comparison, you can get Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop for $9.99 per month with the Photography plan (though its prices are increasing soon). In the non-subscription camp is Skylum’s Luminar Neo, which lists for $299 for a perpetual license. It’s usually on sale ($119 at the time of writing). CyberLink PhotoDirector also includes many of the same features as Aperty, including face and body shaping. It costs $99.99 for a perpetual license or $59.99 for an annual subscription. Two professional-level apps round out the competition: DxO PhotoLab ($229 for a perpetual license) and Capture One Pro ($299 for a perpetual license, $179 per year as a subscription).
What Features Does Aperty Offer?
Aperty is heavy on the kinds of tools that portrait photographers need—those concerned with color, face shape, lighting, and skin. According to Skylum, the software uses a face mesh containing up to 4,000 dots and face-and-body segmentation technology that classifies 30 face and body parts. Here are its standout features:
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Blemish Removal. This tool removes blemishes and other imperfections while preserving skin texture and permanent details. It can also remove or restore freckles.
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Face/Body Skin Color Correction. This balances skin color, enabling quick adjustments of red and green skin tones with a single slider. It removes redness on a person’s face and green tones that result from non-optimal lighting.
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Makeup. This adds blush, contour, and highlights to faces.
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Masking. AI mask layers automatically select people or backgrounds. Alternatively, you can create custom masks with brushes, gradients, or luminosity.
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Presets/LUTs. Presets and LUTs let you edit and color-grade images and include sliders for adjusting their intensity.
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Skin Smoothing. Appropriate for fashion or wedding photography, this feature smooths skin texture, preserving natural tones and details.
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Studio Light. One of the program’s most unique features, this creates artificial lighting sources and applies light textures. It lets you create up to five light sources you can place anywhere in the image.
Getting Started With Aperty
Aperty runs either as a standalone desktop application or as a plug-in for Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop, or macOS Photos. It works on macOS 12 or later and Windows 10 version 1909 or later. For kicks, I installed it on a Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon Arm-based CPU and didn’t come across any issues. It defaulted to installing plug-ins for Lightroom Classic and Photoshop on my system.
(Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
When you first start the application, a simple window prompts you to drag photos into the app or click the Create Project button. I chose the latter, and a box for naming the project appeared (which I named “Test 1”). After that, I had to add photos, either by dragging and dropping them or via a file picker window. The app accepts pretty much any photo file format you can think of, including raw camera files. With those, you can choose a raw profile. The default (Aperty Default) does a better job of rending some overexposed photos than Lightroom’s Adobe Portrait profile, both in terms of color and lighting.
You can also use the Adobe Standard profile for your camera or import one from a DCP or DNG file. Conveniently, you don’t have to go through a separate dialog box or import step to start working on raw files in Aperty, as you do with Adobe’s software.
Interface
(Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
Aperty’s interface is intuitive. I like how the controls revert to their default settings when you double-click on them and how Undo and Revert to Original buttons are always at hand. A split-screen view lets you compare a photo before and after edits, while tapping an eye icon reveals the unedited original. However, I would also like a side-by-side view to see how edits affect the same areas of an image. I also miss the ability to control sliders with the mouse wheel, as you can in Lightroom.
Zoom and pan functions work as you’d expect; just spin the mouse wheel to zoom in and out (no confusing Alt or Ctrl keys are necessary as in Lightroom), and grab and drag to move around in the image. Right-click context menus are also convenient for things like copying and pasting edits, designating an effect as a Favorite, exporting, removing an image from a project, and rotating.
Along the bottom of the interface, you can show or hide a filmstrip of images in a project and get convenient heart (pick) and X (reject) buttons. Next to these is a button for copying and pasting edits, which works with multiple shots as the target.
As in Lightroom, hitting the arrow keys moves you between images in a project. And like with Photoshop, you can always hold the space bar to get to the hand tool for panning around your image. The program makes pretty good use of shortcut keys—C for Crop, R for Retouch, and so on—but there are oddly no keys for pick and reject. Another missing convenience is a snapshot feature that lets you quickly create a copy of an edited image.
Perfecting Your Portraits
A Dodge and Burn tool and an Erase and Clone tool are in the top toolbar, but the main tools Aperty offers for improving portraits are in the right-hand sidebar. At the top of this are buttons for Presets and Masking, which fly out an extra panel. You also get sections for Canvas (cropping and geometry), Essentials (light, color, detail), Retouch, Reshape, and Creative. An Info button shows the file name, date, camera, f-stop, and so on. Clicking any of these tools’ buttons opens their panels, and clicking again closes them.
The Essentials area includes all the things you find in Lightroom (in order)—raw camera file develop settings, White Balance, Exposure, Curves, HSL color editing, Black & White, Sharpen, Details, Structure, and Noise Reduction. The noise reduction tool is basic and on par with what Lightroom had a couple of years ago; it doesn’t offer an AI-automated option. Another surprising no-show is an Auto button to guess the best lighting and color adjustments for the photo at hand. Software from Adobe, CyberLink, and DxO all offer this.
Excellent Portrait Presets
The right side shows the effects of the Flawless Skin preset, which smooths the skin and brightens dark areas under the eyes (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
Aperty’s numerous effect presets are among the main reasons to add the software to your toolkit. Those from Julia Trotti do a remarkable job of not only adding atmosphere but also automatically retouching faces to give skin a smooth but natural glow. Some of these don’t apply instantaneously, taking about 30 seconds on my test PC. Zooming and panning required another rendering. I expect that’s because they’re not straightforward filters that apply to the entire image. Instead, they likely analyze facial features and, for example, apply smoothing to bags under eyes. Thankfully, sliders for each preset let you adjust their strength.
Retouch lets you choose whether you’re working with a portrait of multiple people, as well as select between Child, Elderly, Female, Male, and Teen presets. This makes sense because you likely wouldn’t use the same degree of correction for all of those types of people.
Be aware that these tools have some limitations. For example, the Face features apply only to the actual face, not the neck. As a result, the Skin Smoothing tool in the Face Skin section could result in an uneven photo. You can use Body Smoothing to correct this.
(Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
Make Up presets include Beauty, Contrast, Man, Red Lips, and Soft. In testing, the Man preset impressively made male subjects appear more natural than in original images. The Contrast preset made images look like they were printed in a newspaper. Among the B&W presets, I’m partial to Vintage Slate, which gave pictures a classic heirloom appearance.
Oddly, Aperty doesn’t have any features related to glasses. It also lacks such AI object removal tools, which have become common in photo editing apps, including PhotoDirector and Photoshop. In the past, I’ve removed glare from a pair of glasses with Photoshop’s Generative Remove tool.
Aperty has masking tools that automatically select the background, people, or sky. You can also create masks using a brush, linear and radial gradients, and luminosity. You can fine-tune the automatic selections of those same tools. Masks work with tools in the Essentials and Creative sections only, which makes sense. Once you have a mask, you can select it in a simplified layer panel. Then, the edits you make will apply only to that layer.
(Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
The software includes some nifty creative effects, particularly as it pertains to lighting. You can change the light source direction using a puck on a grid of four quadrants, for example. One of the cooler features is Light Customization. With this, you can apply a light pattern—Strips or Dots—or choose a texture for the pattern from a list that includes Palms, Trees, Vintage Windows, and Water Reflections. You see the effect in the photo as you hover over each option in the drop-down menu.
(Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
Easy Exporting
Export options in Aperty are pretty standard. From the ever-present blue Export button at the top right of the program window, you get a choice of JPEG, PDF, PNG, PSD, and TIFF, with sharpening, size, and color space (only Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, and sRGB) settings. Aperty doesn’t have direct printing features, but you can use the existing tools in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop since it works as a plug-in for those apps. Otherwise, you can simply turn to your operating system’s print features. More significant for some will be the lack of a watermarking tool.
(Credit: Skylum/PCMag)
Aperty includes some powerful and appealing tools for portrait photography, such as special lighting effects and auto-correcting, one-click presets that can make a shot look better. You also get many of the color and lighting tools you need for general photo editing, though not those relevant to landscape or design work. If you like the idea of an application that zeroes in on portrait photography and don’t mind paying for the privilege, Aperty is worth trying. That said, most photographers who cover a variety of subjects should stick with Photoshop (for creative editing and layers) or Lightroom (for corrections and organization), our Editors’ Choice winners.
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The Bottom Line
Skylum Aperty caters to portrait photographers with some cool presets, masking capabilities, and lighting tools, but the software is pricey and lacks some of Photoshop’s best features.
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About Michael Muchmore
Lead Software Analyst
