Remove Spots and Body Retouch — retouching without the plastic look
Tap-to-heal for blemishes and dust, four body reshaping tools with live preview, and the restraint that keeps a portrait looking like a person.
Both retouching tools live in the ⋯ menu in the editor's top bar, away from the sliders — because they work differently from everything else in the app. A slider changes how the photo is rendered. These two change the pixels underneath, and then re-apply your entire grade on top of the result.
Remove Spots
Pick Remove Spots and the photo opens clean, with no filters in the way — you are looking at the original so you can see what actually needs fixing rather than what the grade is hiding.
Then simply tap each blemish. A circle marks the spot. Tap up to twelve of them, then hit Apply, and each marked area is patched by cloning clean surrounding texture with a feathered edge, so there is no visible seam. When it finishes, your LUT, your sliders and your effects are re-applied on top of the healed photo automatically.
It works on more than skin:
- Spots and temporary blemishes on a face
- Dust on a scanned negative or a dirty lens
- A stray hair across a forehead
- A bin, a sign or a plug socket in an otherwise clean background
- Sensor dust in a plain sky
What it is not good at is large or structured objects. The patch takes its texture from what surrounds the spot, so it needs the surroundings to be reasonably uniform. A mark on a cheek: perfect. A person standing in front of a bookshelf: no.
The restraint that matters: remove the things that were not there last week. Spots, dust, a scratch. Leave the things that are the person — freckles, moles, lines, texture. A face with every mark removed does not look younger, it looks synthetic, and everyone can tell.
Body Retouch
Body Retouch offers four tools — Waist, Belly, Slim and Height — and works by direct manipulation rather than by numbers.
Choose a tool, then drag the guide onto the part of the body it should act on. Set the strength with the slider. The preview re-renders live as you move, so you are judging the result rather than guessing at a value. Add another adjustment on top if you need it — they accumulate — and when you press Apply, everything is baked at full resolution and your filters and effects go back on top.
Two things keep this looking real:
Watch the background, not the body. Reshaping warps the pixels around the subject too. Straight lines are what give it away — a door frame that bends, a tiled floor that ripples, a horizon that develops a kink. If the background bends, reduce the strength until it doesn't.
Half of what looks right is right. Set the strength where it looks good, then halve it. Come back to the photo tomorrow and you will be glad you did.
Where retouching belongs in the workflow
Do both of these early — before the grade, ideally right after the crop. Two reasons:
- They work on the original pixels, so a heavy grade sitting on top can hide a blemish while you are working and reveal it after export.
- They re-apply your filter stack when they finish anyway, so there is nothing to lose by having done less of it.
And use the compare gesture constantly. Press and hold anywhere on the canvas to see the untouched original, then let go. If you cannot immediately spot what you changed, you have got it right.