Face Retouch

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Click to upload or drag and drop

Image files only (Max 7MB)

ℹī¸ How it works:
  • Upload a portrait or group photo
  • AI finds the faces and softens the skin
  • Set the strength, preview it, then download

Soften Skin in a Portrait

Harsh light is unkind to photographs. A direct flash, midday sun or an overhead office light exaggerates every pore and shadow, and the result rarely looks like how the person appears in the room. This tool finds the faces in your picture and evens out that texture, so the photo reads closer to life — a quick way to make a selfie or a portrait look better without editing it by hand.

Smoothing That Keeps the Photo Looking Real

The difficulty with skin smoothing is that a plain blur destroys everything — eyelashes, the edge of the lips, the catchlight in the eyes — and leaves a waxy mask. This uses edge-preserving smoothing instead, which evens out broad areas of skin — softening spots and uneven patches so they are less noticeable — while leaving genuine edges intact, and a proportion of the original texture is mixed back in afterwards so the face keeps some grain.

The effect is also confined to a soft oval around each face and fades out towards its edges, so there is no visible rectangle and the background is untouched. Even at maximum strength the original photo is never fully replaced.

Choosing a Strength

  • Subtle (25) – a light touch. Good for a photo that is nearly right already.
  • Natural (50) – the default, and the sensible starting point for most pictures.
  • Strong (80) – for harsh lighting where the texture is the problem. Check the preview before downloading.

The slider goes from 0 to 100 if you want something between the presets. Use Preview Retouch to see the result before committing — skin varies enormously from photo to photo, so the right setting is best judged by eye.

When You Might Need This

  • A profile photo for work, a CV or a professional page
  • A portrait taken with a direct flash, which flattens and hardens skin
  • A group photo shot under harsh overhead lighting
  • A headshot for a team page or a speaker biography
  • A photo that came out fine except for the lighting on faces

Supported Formats and Limits

Upload JPG/JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP or TIFF, up to 7 MB. Pictures are processed at up to 1600 pixels on the longest side.

Frequently Asked Questions

That is the usual failure of skin smoothing, and it comes from tools that simply blur. Here, edges are preserved and part of the original texture is blended back in, so the face keeps grain rather than turning into a flat surface. The waxy look is still possible at very high strengths on an already-smooth face — if the result looks artificial, drop the strength rather than accepting it. Natural is the setting most photos want.

No. This only affects skin texture — nothing is reshaped, slimmed, enlarged or moved. Features, proportions and expression are exactly as they were photographed. It is the equivalent of softer lighting, not of altering how somebody looks.

A gentler version of the smoothing is applied to the whole picture instead, at roughly two thirds of the strength you chose. That is a sensible outcome for a close-up where the face fills the frame and is not recognised as a separate region, but it does mean that uploading a landscape or a product shot will soften the entire image. If the result is not what you expected, that is usually why.

Yes — every face the detector finds is retouched, all at the same strength. Detection is most reliable on faces turned towards the camera and large enough to make out, so people in profile or far back in a crowd may be skipped. If somebody in the group was missed, cropping closer and running that part separately usually works.

This works only on faces, and only on skin texture. Enhance Image works on the whole picture and adjusts brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness — it will not soften skin, and this will not fix a photo that is too dark. They are often worth using together: correct the lighting first, then retouch.

No. Face detection runs on our own servers, so your picture is never passed to a third-party provider or API. It is deleted automatically within an hour and is never used to train anything — worth knowing, since people upload photographs of themselves to this sort of tool.

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