Best Retouching App: Facetune, Portrait Pro or Photoshop

Best retouching app

What is the best retouching app? Many photos seen online and on photo sharing apps like Instagram have been edited or retouched. There are many apps available to retouch photos as a result, it is difficult to know which is the best retouching app to go with. Some apps are quick and easy to use. These are fantastic for getting your photo posted as quickly as possible. While other full feature applications like Photoshop probably require a little training. In addition to Photoshop, we look at Facetune and Portrait Pro, in this best retouching app piece, weighing up the pros and cons.

Disclosure: We have not received compensation from the companies whose products we mentioned in this post.

Facetune

Facetune is a powerful yet simple to use premium smart phone app (available for iOS and android). It is great for concealing small blemishes because you can easily select which areas of the image to edit and to what degree.

Portrait Pro

While Portrait Pro has many powerful features, it is not that difficult to use making it a good contender for the best retouching app. Rather than run on your smartphone, Portrait Pro runs on a PC or Mac. It is a lot of fun to play with because you can easily change face shape, eye colour and skin tone using the intuitive interface. Obviously you can also retouch skin to remove small blemishes – probably an essential feature for the best retouching app to have.

Photoshop

Photoshop is by far the trickiest to get the hang of, out of the three best retouching apps we have looked at. You shouldn’t let that put you off though as there are hundreds of tutorials available online which help you learn Photoshop. As an example, Aaron Nace from Phlearn has been sharing Photoshop video tutorials for five years. The Royal Photographic Society also offer an Introduction to Photoshop course. With Photoshop you can retouch skin and, if you want play around, having just as much fun as Portrait Pro using the new Face-Aware Liquefy tool.

Separation by Frequency

An advantage of Photoshop is that there are limitless techniques for retouching photos. For example separation by frequency used to retouch the post photo in Photoshop lets you smooth skin but keep the texture. This gives a much more realistic look than just airbrushing the skin. On the Photoshop edited picture below, there is no trace of the small blemishes and you can still see the pores. This is contrast to using smoothing techniques which can leave the model looking like a waxwork and remove features like freckles and beauty spots.

Here is a comparison of the photos retouched using Facetune, Portrait Pro and finally Photoshop with Separation by Frequency. Let us know which you think is the best retouching app!

The post picture features Connor Taylor new face from a photo shoot earlier in the year. There’s more images from this shoot with Connor soon, so keep checking jfFrank latest posts!

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London Photography Exhibitions October 2016