How to smooth skin in a photo on iPhone

There is no skin smoothing tool in the Photos app's Adjust settings. Apple's guide to editing photos on iOS 27 describes them as light and colour settings, naming Exposure, Brilliance and Highlights among them, and it describes no way to limit any of them to skin.

The one skin option in Apple's guide is in Photographic Styles. On photos captured on an iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max, Apple's guide lists a Texture choice under Styles, with Soft Skin, Glow and Film among the textures. Apple's iPhone 18 Pro page says the texture controls are there to soften skin details or give a film look.

We could not test Soft Skin for this guide. The iPhone simulator cannot take a photo on an iPhone 18 Pro, so the steps below are Apple's, and the screenshot shows what the editor offers on a photo without a Photographic Style.

Skin finds the face on your phone and smooths only the skin inside its outline. The eyes, brows, lips and nostrils are cut out of the smoothing, and its edge fades out softly rather than stopping at a line, so there is no seam at the jaw or the hairline.

It works by splitting the face into two layers: a blurred one that holds colour and shading, and a detail layer that holds everything finer, from pores and freckles to fine lines and small bumps. Smoothing turns the detail layer down. Texture retention decides how much of it comes back, and it cannot be set below 0.35, so at least 35% of the photo's own fine detail is always kept. The blur is sized to the face, so a close-up and a wider shot are smoothed to the same degree.

Smoothing runs on the iPhone, without a connection, and the photo is not sent anywhere.

Skin in a photo is two things at once. There is its colour and shading, which change slowly across the face, and there is fine detail, which changes from one point to the next: pores, freckles, fine lines, tiny hairs, small bumps. A blemish is fine detail too.

Most smoothing is a blur, and a blur cannot tell a spot from a pore. It removes them together. Push it far enough and the face keeps its colour but loses its surface, and colour without surface is what people mean when they say a face looks plastic, waxy or airbrushed.

Two other things give it away. One is a hard edge where the smoothing stops, at the jaw or the hairline. The other is smoothing that spills onto the eyes, brows and lips, which should stay sharp. PhotoTune's Skin tool is built around all three: a floor on how much detail it removes, a soft edge, and the eyes, brows, lips and nostrils cut out.

Less than you think. At the settings in the screenshot above, Smoothing 0.35 and Texture retention 0.55, the middle of the face loses about 16% of its fine detail, and the difference is easy to see side by side and hard to see on its own. Smoother at full strength takes away 65%, which is the most PhotoTune will remove.

A useful test is the freckles. If they are fading, the pores are going with them. Look at the photo at the size people will see it, on a phone screen, and then zoomed in on a cheek. If it only looks right zoomed out, it is too much.

If one pimple is the reason you are smoothing, heal it instead and smooth lightly, or not at all. Smoothing a whole face hard enough to hide one spot is the most common way a retouch ends up looking edited.

Not in the sense most people mean. A face detection model finds the face on the iPhone, and the smoothing itself is a fixed calculation on the photo's own pixels. Nothing is generated, no new skin is drawn, and the photo is not sent anywhere.

PhotoTune does have separate AI tools, such as Vanish, Hairstyles and Backdrop. Those are different: tapping one sends the photo to our editing service. None of them is needed to smooth skin.

Many photo editors have a smoothing tool. Facetune's own page lists a Smooth tool, which it describes as giving skin an even look with control over how smooth it goes, and a separate Texture tool that adds fine texture back to skin after smoothing.

PhotoTune works the other way round: it never takes all of the photo's own detail away, so there is nothing to add back. Whichever app you use, the checks above still apply. Compare with the original, deal with spots one at a time, and stop while the freckles are still there.

PhotoTune is an iPhone app; there is no Android or web version. Saving an edited photo needs a subscription, and the annual plan starts with 3 days free. The pricing page has every plan and what the trial turns into.

What this guide says about software other than PhotoTune comes from the pages below, read on the dates shown. The PhotoTune screenshots are captures of the app.