Retouch a photo

Soften wrinkles in a photo

Soften a line, keep the face.

Brush over one line at a time and it fades gently — expression stays, years of character stay.

Open a portrait at its original size. Even light and a face occupying much of the frame make small strokes easier to judge.

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A portrait print before and after a line was softened, split down the middle
What this tool does, and the files it opens

Soften one line, keep the face. The heal brush opens in hand and the skin layer starts at a restrained twelve per cent. Work one short line at a time and compare before adding another stroke.

The brush is live. Size it only a little wider than the line, press rather than scrub, and use undo immediately when a sample crosses into an eye, lip or shadow edge.

Open a portrait at its original size. Even light and a face occupying much of the frame make small strokes easier to judge.

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.

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A wrinkle is a line, not a blemish

A spot can be replaced from one quiet patch. A line crosses changing tone and direction, so one large heal is likely to transplant the wrong plane of the face. This opening uses the same real patch-matched brush, but the working method is a sequence of small presses whose sample rings stay on comparable skin.

The twelve-per-cent texture layer settles the seams without flattening the whole face. It is deliberately below the general skin preset: the job here is to reduce contrast in a line, not to remove evidence that skin has structure.

A restrained sequence

Opening setup
Brush
Live, one press per short segment
Skin texture
12%
Tone evening
0%
Export
The operation list is replayed at full resolution

Soften a line, at most seventy per cent

For a longer line, choose Smooth (B) and switch the brush to Soften a line. Paint along the line: the band between pore scale and line scale is attenuated by at most seventy per cent at full flow, and the pores on top are written back as they were read, so the line fades and the skin around it still reads as skin. It is labelled soften, never remove.

A face with no expression lines is not a retouched face; it is a different face.

Where to stop

  • Do not cross an eyelid, lip edge or nostril with one heal; the sample ring will import the feature it touches.
  • Deep expression folds carry shape as well as texture. Removing them entirely changes facial structure, which this tool does not attempt.
  • At ordinary viewing size, a line should still exist faintly. If it disappears at 200% zoom, the edit is already stronger than it needs to be.

What people ask

Can it remove wrinkles completely?
No, and not by accident. The Soften a line brush removes at most 70 per cent of a line's contrast in one full-flow pass, and the heal brush works on short segments. A face with no expression lines is not a retouched face; it is a different face.
What is the difference between the heal brush and Soften a line?
The heal brush replaces a small patch with texture sampled from the ring around it. Soften a line, on the Smooth panel, lowers the contrast of the band at line scale along your stroke and writes the pores back untouched, so the line fades rather than being patched.
Does softening change skin colour?
No. Both move luminance only; the colour of every pixel is written back as it was read, and the chroma harness checks the line brush on nine synthetic skin tones on every build.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. Every stroke runs in this tab, and the export replays them at full resolution here too.

Continue in the portrait room

Photographic visual for Wrinkles