AI has taken many industries by storm in recent years, and the world of photo editing is one of those realms! Today, we are going to talk about AI Photo Retouching. In previous articles, we discussed AI Photo Editing Options for things like color correction and stylized editing. We’ve also discussed The Best Photo Editing Software and Apps in general, including those without AI. In this article, we’ll focus in on AI photo retouching options that perform more advanced tasks like skin retouching, facial makeup & shaping, and even re-lighting a portrait! With that said, let’s dive in…
Evoto
Evoto is an excellent all-around AI photo retouching app that is on our list because it has a wide variety of options, it works well, and the pricing is simple. You can do almost everything, from skin retouching and blemish removal, to highly advanced techniques (that used to take innumerable hours to do manually!) such as body sculpting and glare removal.
Keep in mind, however, that Evoto’s pricing is a per-image business model, so, if you need to retouch more than, say, 800 or 1600 portraits per year, the total price will go higher. (Their two most affordable plans are $80/year for 800 edit credits, and $134 for 1600 edit credits.)
For more details about this AI portrait retouching app, see our Evoto Review!
Aperty
Aperty is a relatively new AI photo retouching software (and a Lightroom Plugin) that offers a beautifully simple, automated interface. Created by the makers of Luminar Neo, Aperty offers a good variety of retouching features, as well as a simple, slider-based interface for dialing in your adjustments. As a huge bonus, it can also double as a basic workflow app, for color-correction as well as useful things such as adding or removing flags, star ratings, etc. for culling purposes.
The retouching tools in Aperty work excellently, including a truly impressive eyebag removal tool that…just works! Aperty also offers makeup tools and face shape adjusting tools which both work very well, along with a lighting adjustment tool that works, although not as well as our next option…
To get more in-depth information, see our full Aperty Review.
Portrait Pro
Portrait Pro has been one of our favorite AI photo retouching apps for many years. The level of polish, precision, and power all demonstrate why we like it so much! It has some of the biggest array of tools of any app, and virtually all of them work extremely well.
The only things we notice from time to time are that the slider defaults can benefit from being dialed back a bit; they might be a little heavy-handed at first. Also, the finest details of skin texture, such as pores and short facial hair, can require a little more effort to get just right, compared to some of the fully automated apps. Of course, we as working professionals usually prefer to make our own adjustments, or at least have the options, whereas a beginner or hobbyist might prefer something that just does a “good enough” job without any adjustments needed.
See our Portrait Pro Review here.
Retouch4me
This AI photo retouching app is mainly used as a Photoshop plugin, which can be well-suited for our professional workflow as a wedding & portrait photography studio. We often need to go into Photoshop for other editing needs anyways, such as combining multiple frames to make a composite image.
Retouch4me offers a great selection of retouching tools, including general retouching, cleaning up a background, and more advanced tasks such as color matching, or creating Photoshop Actions to streamline your Photoshop workflow.
As a drawback, since Retouch4me operates a Photoshop plugin, it is somewhat constrained by the interface tools built into Photoshop. This is different than the other stand-alone AI photo retouching apps because they can operate within their own interface and provide more functionality in terms of different tools and slider adjustments. So, we mainly recommend Retouch4me to those who do, in fact, prefer to use Photoshop plugins.
You can check out our Retouch4me Review for more info!
Other AI Photo Retouching Options
Thanks to how popular AI has gotten in general over the last year, there are of course many other options out there for various needs. Unfortunately, we haven’t tested reviewed them all yet, so we can’t speak to them with authority! We’ve reviewed some, such as Reblum, but most of them are relatively new to the scene as you can imagine.
If you’re working on a mobile device, there are apps such as Fotr and Lensa that focus on mobile-only content creators. If you’re working on a computer, and are looking for more broad AI photo editing apps that include portrait retouching as well as other things, there are some such as Topaz Photo AI and Iris.
Lastly, if you mainly want a complete photo editing workflow solution that just has some basic AI photo retouching tools built-in you can opt to use Adobe’s general face-detection AI within Lightroom to help you do simple tasks such as creating a mask for individual facial features.
Conclusion
All in all, one thing is for sure! That is, we have no shortage of excellent options when it comes to AI portrait retouching apps. Indeed, all of these recommendations are very valuable, and the main deciding factor will simply be finding which one suits your specific needs the best.
