As a somewhat basic photo editor it's OK, with a fair selection of basic tools, though no magic wand selection tool and no layers. And for Retoucher Pro, SoftOrbits grafted on an AI model, with buttons/choices of Restore Faces, Restore & Retouch Faces, Remove Scratches, Unblur and Denoise, and Automatically Colorize photo -- there's also a manual colorize button where you just paint on the colors yourself. On a test B&W photo it does recognize faces, and the 2 restore faces tools do add sharpening, although you cannot adjust the strength, which in this case was much too strong, resulting in LOTS of pixilation. It *might* work better on a digital photo -- I used a B&W test image, which kinda means it's going to be an image from film, to test the colorize option. In any case it doesn't try to reconstruct the face like comparable tools in P/Shop & Luminar Neo, both of which can give astonishingly good results, or fail miserably [such is today's AI].

My reason for testing Photo Retoucher Pro was to check out the colorization, since I've got hundreds of restored B&W photos from the early part of the last century. I've used online tools, along with the tool in Photoshop, and I've managed a few colorized photos that are kinda neat, though no one would ever mistake them for a full color original. And those few photos took considerable work, since nothing I've tried colors everything, and the colors used in different parts of the photo are often inconsistent. Unfortunately, when it comes to colorization, Photo Retoucher Pro is a Fail. It gave the faces a somewhat unrealistic skin tone, along with one arm, and applied a sort of slight sepia tint to a couple of other things in the photo, leaving the vast majority of the photo untouched.

Installing Photo Retoucher Pro, you get a popup window to request a key -- the button to request a key won't work until you enter an email address [I'd suggest they might add a hint somewhere in that dialog box]. The app itself adds a folder in Program Files (x86)\ containing the uninstaller, while the app installs to Users\ [UserName]\ AppData\ Roaming\, taking up 527MB with 57 files in 2 folders. I recorded 4 new keys added to the registry, though the SoftOrbits key in HKCU is a Big one. When you start the app it asks if you want to download and install the AI model, which is of course essential for the AI tools. Click yes and it takes a while, with no indication of what's going on -- I suggest you monitor Windows Task Mgr. so you know when it's done. Installing the AI model adds 2 folders to the SoftOrbits folder where the app's installed, Py\ with 4318 files & 321 folders taking up 102MB, and venv-ret-bkg\ with 45579 files in 4290 folders taking up 5.74GB. Several entries are added to the SoftOrbits key in the registry, along with one new uninstall key.

From the idea this might be a good program for retouching pictures. Since the last years I have installed almost every free version, only to test what is new, but most times only with an immediate uninstall, because it does not work like I would expect it to work.
The biggest pity is the undocumented update policy of this vendor. The newer versions of the programs most times look identical to the previous version, but errors or if they got fixed are not communicated anywhere.
One of the newer problems I have stumbled over comes with one of the installed components: airestore.exe, it paralizes my Windows 8.1 and only manual ending of this process brings back control. Despite the fact that there is no installation path choseable on install, I would wish, there might be shown the running time somewhere in the program. There is no hint how long it will stay registered.

can it upscaleAI generated image