It's not a stretch to claim that the vast majority of iPhone photos contain human faces. And to take that one step further, it's not a stretch to say that most those faces are not model-perfect. That's where Facetune comes in.
Already the top paid photo-editing app in the App Store, Facetune lets you not only fix obvious issues like blemishes and flash-reddened eyes, but also whiten teeth and reshape heads. The company behind Facetune, Lightricks, also makes Enlight (an Apple Best of 2016 award runner-up), an all-around mobile photo editor with Photoshop-like layer capabilities.
Lightricks this week announced a major update to Facetune, which includes capabilities I haven't seen in a photo-editing app to date, even in Adobe's Fix app, which debuted at Apple's iPad Pro launch event.
The first is Live Preview of facial modifications, so you can see the corrections as you shoot the picture. According to Lightricks, this means you can preview modifications such as "smoothing skin, whitening teeth, enhancing details, modifying the shape and size of the eyes and nose, anti-glare and fixing shadows."
The specific face-reshaping tools that make their way into Facetune with this release have appeared in Adobe software already, but not with live preview.
Another innovative feature is Relight. This lets you change the direction of the light source from which the person is being illuminated. So, glare on one side of the face can disappear, for example. Facetune uses 3D modeling to determine light source, and AI technology to determine natural facial structure for the manipulations.
The app will move from the one-shot paid model to an a la carte in-app purchase or subscription model. This means there's a free version you can download, but certain image-enhancement tools will be in-app purchases. If you sign up for a subscription, you'll get all current and new features as they're released. Subscriptions start at $3.99 per month, but you can get a full year for $19.99. Individual in-app purchases cost from 99 cents to $2.99, and you can try them free before you buy.
Look for an update of my full review of Facetune on PCMag.com in the coming days.