Facetune vs AirBrush: which retouch app to actually buy

The verdict, stated plainly

These two are close enough that most comparisons refuse to call it. Here is the call.

For most people, AirBrush. Its free tier covers the core retouching that the majority of readers came for, which is blemishes, a little smoothing, teeth and eyes, and it does not put a watermark across the work you did. Its wider toolkit reaches past the face into object removal, restoration and enhancement, which is more of what real photos need. Its defaults land closer to believable than Facetune's do.

For frequent, precise face work, Facetune. It is the more controllable tool and it is not close. Per-feature adjustment, a retouch engine that avoids the uniform blur its reputation is built on when you use it carefully, and video support. If you retouch portraits as a routine rather than an occasion, the subscription pays for itself in control alone.

The thing neither marketing page will tell you is that the difference between a good result and an obvious one is almost never the app. It is how far you pushed the sliders. Both of these tools look natural at low strength and plastic at default.

Side by side

Where AirBrush genuinely wins

The free tier is usable. This is the whole argument. You can remove a blemish, even skin slightly, brighten teeth and export the result without paying and without a watermark stamped across it. Facetune's free version keeps stopping you at the point where you want to keep the work.

Gentler defaults. Both apps can produce a natural result and both can produce a mannequin. AirBrush starts nearer the natural end, which matters because most people never move a slider from where it landed.

It fixes photos, not just faces. Object removal, old photo restoration and general enhancement are in the same app, so a holiday photo with a stranger in the background and a shiny forehead is one app rather than two.

Lower stakes. If you retouch a photo every few weeks, an app you can use for nothing beats an app you rent all year for occasional use.

The honest weaknesses: its per-feature control is blunter, its video support is thin, and its interface pushes the premium tier hard. It also includes body reshaping, which is where any retouch app stops being retouching.

Where Facetune genuinely wins

Control. Facetune lets you work on one feature at a time with a precision nothing else on the phone matches. Used at low strength, it is capable of retouching that survives a close look, which is the opposite of its public reputation. That reputation exists because the tools are powerful and the defaults are generous, not because the engine is crude.

Video. Retouching that holds up across frames is genuinely difficult and Facetune does it. If you post video of yourself, this is the practical argument for the subscription.

The wider toolkit. Hair try-ons, backgrounds, headshot generation and one-tap enhancement have grown into a large feature set, and there is now a browser version with a reduced set of tools if you want to work on a laptop.

Consistency. Saved adjustments and a familiar layout make the tenth portrait as quick as the first, which is what matters if this is a routine.

The honest weaknesses: the free tier is close to a demo, the subscription is the only real way to use it, the smoothing at default strength is the origin of the plastic look everyone recognises, and the reshaping tools make it very easy to quietly change somebody's face.

Who each one is wrong for

AirBrush is wrong for you if you retouch portraits as work or a regular habit. You will hit the ceiling on per-feature control within a month, its video support will not carry you, and you will end up paying for Facetune anyway having paid for both.

Facetune is wrong for you if you edit a selfie every couple of weeks. You will be renting a professional tool to do three minutes of work a month, and the defaults will make those three minutes look like six minutes. It is also wrong for anyone who has noticed that their photos are starting to look like somebody else, because the tools that cause that are the ones it is best at.

Both are wrong for you if what you actually want is even skin that keeps its texture. Neither app is built around the idea of leaving freckles, pores and face shape alone, so restraint has to come from you every time. A free editor is often the better answer: Snapseed heals a blemish without touching anything else, and Lightroom's texture control evens skin without blurring it. Our natural retouch comparison covers the settings in detail.

For disclosure, this is the gap ShutterAI is being built for. Glow is one dial that evens tone and softens blemishes while leaving texture alone, and there is no slider for face or body shape, on purpose. It is our own app, it is coming to iPhone this fall, free to start, so it is not something you can compare against these two today. The list is on the homepage.

Pick this if

Whichever you choose, the rules that keep it believable are the same: heal blemishes one at a time instead of smoothing globally, keep smoothing under a quarter strength, whiten almost nothing, and leave reshaping alone entirely.