Retouch a photo

Remove blemishes from a photo

Tap a spot. It's gone.

Click a blemish and it is healed with the skin around it. Every tap can be undone on its own.

JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP and ICO open directly, and TIFF where your browser supports it. A HEIC from a phone fetches a decoder the first time one turns up.

No photo handy?

  • Free
  • No sign-up
  • Photos stay on your device
Close-up of a portrait print: left half untouched, right half with spots healed
What this tool does, and the files it opens

Remove a spot, keep the skin. The brush is in your hand. Size the ring a little larger than the mark, press once, and look at the result at full zoom before the next one.

Open a portrait and the Heal tool is already in hand: click a spot to replace it, or drag across a run of small marks. Size and hardness sit at the top of this column and every stroke lands in the ledger under them, where any single one can be switched off without undoing the rest.

JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP and ICO open directly, and TIFF where your browser supports it. A HEIC from a phone fetches a decoder the first time one turns up.

Keys on the desk: Move V · Heal J · Clone S · Smooth B · Dodge O · Burn N · Colour A · Whiten W · Red-eye R · Skin F · Shine H · Under-eye U · Face G · hold Space to see the original · Ctrl Z to undo.

Upload a photo

What the tool does to a face

One press does four things. It reads a neighbourhood around the point you pressed and builds a low-frequency copy of it. It walks two rings of candidate positions — forty-eight in all, at two and a bit and three and a bit brush-widths out — and scores each on two terms: how closely its tone matches the destination across sixteen probe points, and how much texture energy it carries of its own. It picks the lowest total. Then it writes the candidate’s texture over the destination’s tone, feathered by the hardness setting.

The second scoring term is the one that matters and the one most tools omit. A candidate patch that happens to match in tone but contains a pore cluster, a hair or the edge of a freckle will transplant that feature onto the place you just cleaned, and it will sit there looking exactly like what it is. Penalising a candidate’s own high-frequency energy is how the brush finds quiet skin rather than merely nearby skin.

Because the tone under the stroke is the destination’s own, the result carries no edge. That is not a blend being tuned — there is nothing to blend, because only the texture moved.

The order to work in

Blemishes before smoothing, always. A dark mark left in place when the skin layer runs does not disappear — the smoothing pass reads it as low-frequency tone and spreads it into a soft grey patch several times its original size, which is harder to remove than the spot was. The stack enforces the order internally, but the point stands for how you work: clean the discrete marks, then decide how much texture to take.

Zoom to 200 with the 2 key before you start and pan with a drag. Size the brush so the drawn ring clears the mark by a little. Press once per mark rather than scrubbing; each press is one scored transplant and repeating it in the same place stacks two of them. If a stroke lands badly, undo it and move the brush rather than healing over the heal.

What the brush runs on
Candidates scored per stroke
48, in two rings
Ring distance
2.2× and 3.4× the brush radius
Probe points per candidate
16, on a spiral
Cost terms
tone match + 0.8 × own texture energy
Brush size
In pixels of the exported file, [ and ] on the keyboard
Hardness
0 to 100%, backslash steps it
History
120 undo steps, and every stroke in the ledger
Stored as
position, radius and hardness in fractions of the frame

What it will not do

  • It cannot heal a mark that spans a feature edge. The sample ring has to sit on skin of roughly one tone. A blemish lying across a nostril, a lip border or the rim of a shadow gives the scorer nothing clean to find, and the honest move is two small strokes rather than one large one.
  • It is not built to remove things from a background. A ring a few brush-widths across cannot reconstruct structure, so a doorframe or a shoulder behind the subject comes back smeared. That is a different algorithm and a different site.
  • It keeps the sitting, not the session. A hundred and twenty undo steps and every stroke in the ledger last as long as the portrait is open. Reloading the page clears everything, because nothing here is written down anywhere.

What people ask

How is this different from a clone stamp?
A clone stamp copies a neighbourhood wholesale, pixels and all, which is why cloned skin repeats a mole or a pore cluster a centimetre away and reads as fake to anyone who looks at full size. This samples a ring of candidate patches around the mark, scores each on how closely its low-frequency tone matches the destination and on how little texture of its own it carries, and transplants only the winner's texture onto the destination's tone. The seam is the tone that was already there, so there is no seam. The desk has a Clone tool as well, for the times you want exactly the wholesale copy — a stray hair across a plain background, a repeated pattern — but on skin, Heal is the one to reach for.
How large should the brush be?
A little larger than the mark, and no larger than that. The ring is drawn on the picture so you can see it before you press. If the brush is much wider than the blemish it starts carrying the tone of whatever else falls inside it — the edge of a nostril, a lash, a lip — and the transplant brings that with it. Square brackets resize it in steps; backslash steps the hardness.
It left a pale patch where the spot was.
The ring landed somewhere that is genuinely a different tone from where the spot was — near the edge of a shadow, on the turn of a nose, or across a lighting boundary. Undo the stroke, shrink the brush so the sample ring stays on one plane of the face, and press again. On a mark that sits right on a feature edge, two smaller strokes from either side usually beat one large one.
Can I remove a mole permanently, or a scar?
You can remove either from this photograph, which is all any editor does. Whether you should is a different question and this tool has no opinion about a particular face. What it will not do is treat this as skincare: nothing here diagnoses, treats or affects a skin condition, and no claim about skin or appearance follows from moving pixels in a picture.
Can it take the person out of the background?
No, and it is not a permission that is being withheld — the engine is wrong for it. This brush assumes a small mark on a broadly continuous surface and finds its replacement in a ring a few brush-widths across. A stranger behind a subject needs a large structured region reconstructed from a much wider context, which is a different algorithm with different failure modes, and it is not in this tool. A small mark on a background — a speck, a stray hair, a dot on a wall — can be copied over with the Clone tool.
How many strokes can I undo?
A hundred and twenty steps, backwards and forwards with Ctrl or Cmd and Z. Better than that, every stroke is a row in the stroke ledger: switch the third one off or strike it out and the seven after it stay exactly as they were. Strokes are stored as operations rather than pixels — a path, a radius and a hardness in fractions of the frame — so the full-resolution export replays them against the full-size picture instead of enlarging a preview. That is also why undo is instant regardless of how large the photograph is.

Read next

Photographic visual for Blemishes