Natural-looking skin smoothing and brightening: how much is too much

Light retouching can make a portrait taken in poor light look like it was taken in good light. Heavy retouching makes people look like wax figures and, on official documents, can get a photo rejected. This guide explains how the retouching in ImgCutout works, which settings tend to look natural, and when you should leave it off entirely.

What the retouch tool actually does

The single-image tool has two retouch sliders, Smooth skin and Brighten skin, each from 0 to 100. Both are applied only where they belong, using two small AI models from Google's open-source MediaPipe project that run on your device:

1. Face landmarks. A face landmark model finds the outline of each face and the positions of the eyes, eyebrows, and lips.
2. Skin and hair segmentation. A selfie segmentation model labels which pixels are skin, hair, clothing, and background.
3. Smoothing. On facial skin only, an edge-preserving filter (a guided filter) softens fine texture and small blemishes while keeping strong edges such as the jawline, nostrils, and lips sharp. Eyes, eyebrows, and lips are excluded so they stay crisp.
4. Brightening. A gentle tone curve lifts the brightness of facial skin (again excluding eyes, brows, and lips) and other visible skin, so a face in shadow looks evenly lit.

Like the background removal, all of this runs in your browser. The face models are downloaded once from this website and cached. Your photo is not sent anywhere, which matters for something as personal as a close-up of your face.

Settings that still look like you

There is no single correct value; it depends on the photo's resolution, light, and the look you want. As a starting point:

Use the compare slider to check the result against the original. Three warning signs that you have gone too far:

• Pores and fine lines have vanished completely. Real skin has texture; perfectly smooth skin reads as artificial.
• The face is brighter than the neck and hands. Brightening that does not match the rest of the body looks like a spotlight.
• The edges of the face look soft or haloed. At very high settings, smoothing can creep into the transition between face and hair.

A useful habit: set the slider to the value that looks good, then reduce it by a third. Retouching tends to look stronger to other people than to the person who applied it.

When not to retouch

• Passport, visa, and ID photos. Official photo rules generally prohibit digital alteration of the face. Leave both sliders at zero. See passport and ID photos.
• Professional profiles in some industries. In fields where trust and authenticity matter (healthcare, law, finance), a natural, unretouched headshot often makes a better impression than a polished one.
• Photos of other people without asking. Changing someone's appearance, even subtly, is personal. Ask before retouching a photo of a colleague or friend for publication.
• Product photos. The retouch tool is designed for faces. On products, use edge and background tools instead and keep the product itself unedited, especially for resale. See resale listing photos.

Retouching and the background together

If you are also replacing the background, retouching and background removal work together: the retouch is applied to the person, and the cutout and new background are applied on top. A few tips:

• Brightening and bright backgrounds. A brightened face on a white background can look washed out. Light gray is often more flattering.
• Match warm and cool. If you brighten a face that was lit by warm indoor light and put it on a cool blue background, the mismatch is more visible. A neutral or warm background is easier.
• Smoothing near hair. If hair edges look too soft after smoothing, reduce smoothing slightly before adjusting the background edge.

Retouching in batches

The bulk background remover has the same Retouch settings, applied to every portrait in the batch. This is useful for team headshots, where everyone should get the same subtle treatment. Keep values low for batches: photos taken by different people in different light will respond differently, and a setting that suits one photo may be too strong for another. Review each result before downloading.

Summary

Good retouching is subtle: it compensates for poor light or a noisy camera, not for the person's face. The tool smooths only facial skin with an edge-preserving filter and brightens skin without touching eyes, brows, or lips, all on your own device. Keep values low, compare against the original, reduce by a third, and turn retouching off entirely for official documents.