Face retouching: shine, blemishes and skin tone

Darkening takes away the brightness of the skin along with the shine — the forehead becomes a flat grey patch. Here the colour of the light source and the amount of reflection are computed, and only the reflection is subtracted. The colour and the volume of the skin under the shine remain.

Because no blur is applied. The photo is split into three frequency bands and only the middle one — uneven tone — is reduced. Pores, freckles, fine hairs and stubble live in the top band and are left untouched.

Recognition scales the frame to its own input size, so what matters is not the pixel count but the share of the frame the face occupies: on a document photo or in a wide shot that is 3–6%, and the ordinary pass misses it. That is why the frame is also checked in overlapping pieces and in all four rotations — and if the face still is not found, press “Point at the face” and tap it, and the search runs around that point at four scales.

Yes. Light and skin tone, blemish removal and frame edits need no face geometry and always work. There is also a separate “Work by skin colour” mode: the boundary is set by hue rather than by the face outline, so shine is removed as well — but the neck and hands are edited too and eyes and teeth are no longer protected, and the tool says so outright.

The Brush tab: press “Remove a blemish”, set the brush size and tap the spot. A similar patch of skin from the ring around it is moved onto the spot, and the difference in lighting is levelled by a plane fitted over the edge — so what is transferred is the texture, not the brightness of somewhere else. Every tap can be undone, and all the spots are replayed at full resolution when you save.

If at least one colour channel has not hit the maximum, the skin colour is restored from it. If all three are blown to white, there is no skin data left in the file and it cannot honestly be restored — so the tool shows what share of the skin is in that state instead of substituting a grey patch.

Yes. Skin colour is measured from the photo itself at every point of the face rather than taken from a table. On dark skin the shine is higher in contrast, and that is exactly where ordinary filters leave grey patches — here the measured colour of the light is subtracted.

When the colour of the light matches the colour of the skin — a warm lamp on pale skin, say — the reflection and the skin stop differing in colour. That is a limit of the photo, not a setting: the tool shows a warning instead of pretending it coped.

They are excluded from shine processing entirely. Their outlines come from face geometry and are widened with margin so that eyelashes and the edge of the lips fall under protection. Separate sliders can brighten the whites of the eyes and take the yellow cast off the teeth — inside those same outlines only.

Yes, on the Frame tab. Besides 90° rotation and flipping there is a tilt by fractions of a degree and a “Level by the eyes” button: the line between the eye centres is known from face geometry, and its slope is the tilted horizon of the portrait. The frame stays full — the corners never go transparent.

Yes, every face found is processed, each with its own mask. How many faces were found is shown above the photo.

The frame is analysed on a reduced copy for speed, but the result is applied to the full size of the photo. In the save block you can keep the size as in the original or scale the long side down to the screen you need; the ceiling you chose and the ceiling of your plan are both shown in the list, so nothing is ever scaled down silently. The format is JPEG, PNG or WebP.

Yes, when saving as JPEG. An ordinary export from a browser canvas loses all metadata, so the data from the original is transferred into the saved file separately — capture date, camera, lens. The orientation flag is reset in the process: the pixels are already upright, and a flag left in place would rotate the photo a second time. The geotag travels along with everything else if it was in the original: stripping something nobody asked about would be as much of a surprise as losing the date. To remove metadata there is the image metadata tool.

Yes — pick several photos and they become a queue under the upload zone. The skin and light settings are shared across the queue: click a thumbnail to check the strength on a particular photo. Rotation and blemish edits are not applied to a batch — they belong to one frame. A photo where no face is found is skipped and does not use up the daily allowance.