Perfectly Clear Complete

• Perfectly Clear Complete can be activated on two computers per license key. If you have only activated Perfectly Clear Complete on one computer, you can use that license key on a second. If you want to run it on a third system, one must be deactivated. In order to deactivate Perfectly Clear: Start AppsManager.
• Mar 24, 2017 Perfectly Clear Complete is a plug-in for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, and Paintshop Pro made by Athentech — athentech.com. Hands-On with Perfectly Clear 0.0 Introduction 0.1 Course Overview 0.2 Using Exercise Files. 1.0 Installing Perfectly Clear 1.1 Installing Perfectly Clear Complete 1.2 Checking for Updates.

Introducing
Plug-ins 2.0

Our award-winning software has been re-engineered to deliver our fastest, most comprehensive, and most powerful suite of photo corrections to date. Now you can automatically fix, fine-tune and batch in half the time—all while staying within your workflow. Our time-saving software helps you spend less time editing and more time doing what you do best—capturing incredible images.
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Check out the new Perfectly Clear Complete Version 3. Built for precision. Made for beauty. Above all, you want better photos. But what if you could have better photos faster? Perfectly Clear has mastered the science of intelligent image correction – creating superior quality photos in record time, so you can get back to doing what you really.

Introducing version 4.0 Mobile Apps for Android & iOS

Imagine being able to combine the convenience of a camera phone with the features of DSLR. We've spent the last few years re-engineering our technology to deliver the best shots with the least amount of effort. Now, with our fastest, most powerful mobile apps yet, you can correct your photos 18 ways with one tap and, preserve forever, and post perfect pictures instantly.

Perfectly Clear App for Android

V4 gives you Next Generation Beautify, Red-eye Removal, new user-friendly interface with a powerful photo browser and Quick Correct mode, significantly faster processing, new capture capabilities leveraging the innovations in Lollipop, and the ability to open and save photos using Amazon Cloud Drive.
Learn More

Introducing version 4.0 Mobile Apps for Android & iOS

Imagine being able to combine the convenience of a camera phone with the features of DSLR. We've spent the last few years re-engineering our technology to deliver the best shots with the least amount of effort. Now, with our fastest, most powerful mobile apps yet, you can correct your photos 18 ways with one tap and, preserve forever, and post perfect pictures instantly.

Perfectly Clear App for Android

V4 gives you Next Generation Beautify, Red-eye Removal, new user-friendly interface with a powerful photo browser and Quick Correct mode, significantly faster processing, new capture capabilities leveraging the innovations in Lollipop, and the ability to open and save photos using Amazon Cloud Drive.
Learn More

Introducing LUCiD for iOS

We all want great-looking photos, a chance to capture a memory and share it with others. But sometimes your smartphone doesn't quite get the job done. LUCiD helps you improve photos in an instant while you're on the go and share those perfect moments with friends faster than ever.

There are times when I want to spend as long as necessary to enhance a near-perfect image into a great one for my portfolio or my own pleasure. But most of the time I just want to spend a reasonable amount of time moving portrait and event images through my computer and out to my clients. For these occasions, Perfectly Clear Complete, with its one-click image enhancements and batch processing, is a near-perfect solution.

Perfectly Clear software from Athentech has been available for years and is widely used by photographers and photo labs for quick, one-click image corrections. In recent months, Athentech has introduced the Perfect Eyes and Perfect Skin plug-ins as separate products. While these plug-ins remain available as separate products, Athentech has introduced Perfectly Clear Complete to bundle them together into one integrated package. Perfectly Clear Complete includes Perfectly Clear, Perfect Exposure, Perfect Eyes, and Perfect Skin plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. These installations for both Adobe programs can be made on two computers, and they can be two Macs, two Windows, or one of each. I tested the $149 Perfectly Clear Complete 2.2.2 on both Mac and Windows and found that they look and function identically.

What's New

The power of the original Perfectly Clear was always in its presets, which consistently improved nearly any image you applied them to. Version 2.0 of the Perfectly Clear plug-in, included in the Complete collection, enhances the program with new presets including Beautify, Beautify+, Noise Removal, Landscape and Vivid. It also includes workflow enhancements such as before-and-after split views, along with opacity and zoom sliders.

Perfectly Clear Complete—along with bundling the Exposure, Skin, Eyes, and Perfectly Clear Photoshop and Lightroom plug-ins together, and making them cross platform—includes all 40 presets and 21 adjustment corrections from the individual plug-ins. You are also able to modify each preset to your personal taste and save the modifications as a new user preset for future use. Current for facebook 1 0 2. The presets and adjustments are available in a common interface, and navigating between them is quick and easy.

User Friendliness

While the individual plug-ins share a common interface, the Complete collection takes the workspace design to a new level of usability. Opening an image automatically applies the Details preset, which amazingly is all I felt I needed about 90 percent of the time! Disclosure arrows below the presets move you forward or backward through the four plug-ins (five if you include the two sets of presets available in Perfect Skin). And a pop-up list allows you to choose any of the available presets in the four plug-ins directly, or your user-defined preset, while also indicating which preset is currently being applied. The pop-up list can greatly simplify the creation of a Photoshop action for batch processing.

The Adjust tab in the Complete collection contains all of the possible adjustment corrections all of the time, unlike with the individual plug-ins where only the applicable adjustment modifications are available. It's a real time-saver.

The Teenagers preset did a good job with correcting the initial capture (top), but I decided to do further adjustments, including face slimming, in the Portrait palette of the Adjust panel (bottom). Photos © Stan Sholik

What We Liked

The new (to me, at least) Perfect Skin and Perfect Eyes plug-ins are impressive. Facial features and skin areas are automatically and accurately detected without user intervention, even with the face turned well away from the camera. The range of corrections available with the sliders in the Adjust panel is enough to allow you to overdo most of the corrections for all but the worst possible skin conditions. And of course, being able to click on a preset, immediately see the effect and likely have it end up as something you wanted is wonderful.

The ability to see before-and-after views of the changes by clicking on the preview image, activating the double (split-screen) view, or choosing the split view with a movable viewing line is great. And now that Athentech has added a percentage readout to the zoom slider, it is possible to zoom to 100 percent to accurately preview noise removal settings. It would be even nicer to have a button to take you to 100 percent automatically, although the 'Z' key does take you there.

What We Didn't Like

No program is perfect for every user all the time. I prefer working on images in a workspace as large as possible. I would have preferred a button that would take the plug-in to a full screen workface rather than having to drag the Perfectly Clear Complete window to full screen. At least that view is sticky, so that the next time you access the filter, it returns to the dragged out size.

While I found the range of adjustments for Perfect Eyes and Perfect Skin more than adequate, I would like to see a highlight and a shadow slider in the adjustments to provide finer control over those tones. And a histogram with highlight and shadow warnings wouldn't be out of place either.

Finally, while the preview window updates quickly once you select a preset, it would be even quicker if the preview would update simply by rolling or pausing your mouse over the name of the preset.
How it Compares

Athentech Perfectly Clear Complete

While there are programs that offer bits of the automation that Perfectly Clear Complete provides, none come close to the range of presets. DxO OpticsPro 11 does a better job making the initial adjustment, it works directly on RAW files that Perfectly Clear must process first through Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, but OpticsPro costs more and isn't set up for portrait adjustments. Corel PaintShop Pro X8 includes the Perfectly Clear 2 SE and only costs $79 but is missing Perfect Skin, Perfect Eyes and the full range of Perfectly Clear adjustments. Lightroom itself allows you to apply an automatic adjustment preset on import, but I have found this to be mostly inadequate and requiring additional corrections once the images are in the program. Anthropics Portrait Pro 15 and Landscape Pro 1.1 both provide more powerful tools in their particular areas of expertise but require more effort to extract the ultimate image from them. Perfectly Clear Complete is a welcome collection of programs for photographers wanting to quickly and painlessly process a single image or a large group of similar images with a minimum amount of time and effort.

Stan Sholik is a commercial/advertising photographer in Santa Ana, CA, specializing in still life and macro photography. His latest book, Shoot Macro, for Amherst Media is available now.

To read this article in the digital edition, click here.

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