How to smooth skin in a photo without it looking fake

Open Retouch a face photo, choose the portrait and tap Natural retouch. It smooths the skin a little, evens out redness, takes down shine and lifts dark circles, and whitens teeth and brightens eyes a touch, all at values in the lower half of their sliders. Compare with the original, adjust a slider or two, and download.

Steps

1. Open Retouch a face photo and choose a photo where the face is clear. The photo editor opens with the Face tool, and the faces are found on your device.
2. Tap Natural retouch for a light pass, or move the sliders under Retouch yourself. Each one starts at zero.
3. In a group photo, pick a face under Faces to change one person only. All faces changes everyone else.
4. Switch the view to Compare to see the original beside the result. On a phone, hold the compare button over the photo instead.
5. Download. Undo and redo work for every slider, and a double-click sets a slider back to zero.

What each slider changes

Why it does not look plastic

Skin looks fake after retouching when its texture is wiped away. Here the smoothing follows the picture's edges, so the line of a nostril, an eyelid or the lips stays sharp, and the finest detail (pores, fine hair) is put back after smoothing. Only the skin is changed: the eyes, brows and lips are left out of it, and so is anything that is not skin-coloured, such as hair falling across a cheek or the frame of a pair of glasses.

The skin's own colour is read from the cheeks of each face, so the same settings work on light and dark skin, and nothing is made lighter or paler overall. Shading that gives the face its shape stays, because only small, local differences are evened out.

A few habits keep a retouch believable:

• Stay under about 40 on Smooth skin. Freckles, moles and laugh lines are part of a face; a light pass softens a breakout without removing them.
• Use Even tone for redness rather than raising smoothing further.
• Look at the result at full size before you share it. The preview is smaller than the saved photo.

Small faces and group photos

Faces in a full-length or group photo can be small. The editor looks for them again, enlarged, around each person's head, so most are found. With more than one face, Faces lists them left to right (Face 1, Face 2...), and the face you pick is outlined on the photo. A face turned well away from the camera can still be missed; the panel says when no face is found.

Your photo stays on your device

The face points (eyes, lips, brows and the outline of the face) are found by a face landmark model that runs in your browser, downloaded once from this site. The retouch itself is a set of ordinary image steps placed by those points; nothing is generated, and the photo is never uploaded. Saving also drops most hidden metadata, such as the GPS location your phone may have recorded.