What is Facetune?
Facetune is a mobile application designed for detailed, professional-grade portrait retouching and beauty editing directly on a smartphone. Its core function is to provide users with a suite of powerful tools to enhance facial features, smooth skin, adjust lighting, and reshape elements without needing a desktop computer or complex software like Adobe Photoshop.
The app operates on a freemium model, offering basic functionality for free but locking its most advanced features behind a subscription paywall. Facetune is developed by Lightricks, an Israeli company behind other popular apps like Enlight and Videoleap. The company focuses on using artificial intelligence and intuitive interfaces to make high-end photo manipulation accessible to a broad, non-expert audience.
Who is Facetune best for?
Facetune is not a general-purpose photo editor; its specialism is the human face. It is engineered for users whose primary editing goal is to perfect portraits, whether for personal branding, professional portfolios, or social media content. The toolset assumes you are working on an image containing at least one person, and its value diminishes significantly for landscape, product, or abstract photography.
It is best suited for individuals and professionals who prioritise flawless, magazine-style retouching in a mobile workflow.
- Social Media Influencers and Content Creators: For those building a personal brand on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, where portrait quality is paramount.
- Professional Photographers (Mobile Workflow): Photographers who need to deliver quick, polished previews to clients or who use mobile shots for professional purposes.
- Makeup Artists and Beauty Professionals: Ideal for showcasing work with perfected skin texture and lighting while keeping makeup details intact.
- Individuals Seeking High-End Selfie Enhancement: Users wanting granular control over their appearance in photos beyond basic native filters.
Key features
Smooth & Patch
The Smooth tool is the cornerstone of Facetune’s skin editing. Unlike a simple blur filter, it uses adaptive algorithms to even out skin tone and texture while attempting to preserve natural details like pores, freckles, and hair.
The Patch tool functions like a healing brush, allowing you to sample a clear area of skin and clone it over blemishes, spots, or stray hairs for seamless removal.
Reshape & Adjust
This suite provides precise control over facial geometry. The Reshape tool lets you push or pull specific areas, like slimming a jawline, adjusting the width of the nose, or subtly altering the shape of lips, with a pinching motion.
The Adjust feature offers more global sliders for modifying the size or position of specific facial features, such as moving eyes closer together or increasing lip height.
Details & Tone
The Details tool is designed for selective sharpening, allowing you to enhance the crispness of eyes, eyebrows, and hair to make features pop. The Tone tool is a colour correction brush that lets you paint on adjustments to specific areas, such as reducing redness on skin, brightening the whites of eyes, or adding colour to lips and cheeks without affecting the entire image.
Lighting & Filters
Facetune includes advanced lighting controls that go beyond simple exposure sliders. You can add new directional light sources to the scene, change the colour temperature of existing light, or use a ‘Relight’ feature to simulate studio lighting effects.
The filters are tailored for portraits, with categories focused on skin tones, vibrancy, and dramatic effects.
Background Editing
This extends Facetune’s utility beyond the face. Tools allow you to blur backgrounds, completely replace a background with a solid colour or new image, or use a ‘Background’ tool to remove and edit the area behind the subject with more control than many native portrait modes offer.
Facetune pricing
Facetune operates on a subscription model. The free version provides access to basic tools and filters but places a watermark on exports and locks almost all the professional retouching features. To unlock the full app, you must subscribe.
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $5.99/month | Full access to all features |
| Annual | $39.99/year (approx. $3.33/month) | Discounted rate; no one-time purchase option |
There is no option for a one-time perpetual license. The value proposition hinges entirely on your need for its specific toolset.
For a professional who regularly outputs client-ready portraits from their phone, the annual fee may be justifiable as a business expense. For a casual user wanting to edit the occasional selfie, the subscription cost is steep compared to free alternatives like Snapchat or Instagram’s built-in tools, or one-time purchase apps.
The lack of a free trial for the premium features is a notable drawback, making it difficult to properly evaluate the software before committing financially.
What we like
- Selective editing precision: The ‘Details’ and ‘Tone’ tools are exceptional for a mobile app, allowing for corrections that feel localised and natural.
- AI-powered skin smoothing: The ‘Smooth’ feature retains skin texture while reducing imperfections, avoiding the overly plastic look common in cheaper apps.
- Intuitive interface: The UI is relatively intuitive for the complexity of tasks on offer, with helpful tutorials integrated for new users.
- Reliable background tools: Background editing offers a level of control over depth-of-field and replacement that rivals some desktop software.
- Ongoing development: Regular updates from Lightricks add new features and refinements, suggesting sustained support.
What could be better
- Mandatory subscription: The recurring payment model will be a significant barrier for users opposed to subscriptions for a photo editing app.
- Performance on older devices: Processing can be slow on older phone models, especially when applying multiple complex effects to high-resolution images.
- Learning curve: Achieving natural-looking results takes practice; overuse of the ‘Reshape’ or ‘Smooth’ tools is easy and can lead to an artificial appearance.
- Mobile-only: The app is exclusively for iOS and Android, with no desktop version, limiting its integration into professional workflows that rely on computers.
Facetune verdict
Facetune is a top-tier mobile portrait retouching app, but its subscription-only model and lack of a free trial make it a serious commitment best suited to professionals.
Facetune is a powerful, highly specialised tool that excels at its primary function: making people look better in photos. It stands at the top tier of mobile portrait retouching applications, offering a depth of control that bridges the gap between simple filter apps and professional desktop software.
The quality of its algorithms for skin smoothing, detail enhancement, and selective colour correction is its greatest strength, enabling edits that can be both transformative and subtle. However, this capability comes with caveats.
The subscription-only pricing model makes it a serious commitment, and the lack of a free trial means you must pay to discover if its nuances suit your style. Furthermore, its very power can be a pitfall; achieving a natural, believable result requires a restrained hand and a good eye, as it is exceptionally easy to create an over-processed image.
Facetune is recommended primarily to social media professionals, influencers, and photographers who require consistent, high-quality portrait retouching as part of a mobile-centric workflow and for whom the annual fee is a justifiable business cost.
Casual users who edit selfies occasionally will likely find the subscription hard to warrant. Those needing full photo editing beyond portraits should look to more versatile applications like Adobe Lightroom or VSCO. Ultimately, Facetune is a leading specialist, but its value is entirely dependent on how often you need to perform cosmetic surgery on your photographs.
