You know those crazy magazine cover retouch jobs, where a good-looking celebrity lady gets transformed into an unblemished, cartoonishly proportioned, supermarket-checkout-ready goddess with perfect skin, through the magic of Photoshop and unreasonable expectations?

Now you can get your own retouch transformation — should you so choose.

A new iOS app called Facetune helps edit pictures of people’s faces. Its tools can whiten teeth, smooth wrinkles, cover blemished skin, remove red-eye, apply makeup, add or remove hair, blur background objects, and change the shape of a face.

There a tons of apps to help give mobile photos more contrast or sharper focus or a sepia tone. But many of those effects tend to be oriented towards landscapes and still lifes. Facetune is all about the faces.

Released last week by a small bootstrapped company called Lightricks out of Jerusalem, the app is currently the No. 1 paid photo and video app in the U.S. after being featured by Apple. It costs $1.99.

I played around with Facetune a bit, and it didn’t take long to notice that a light touch goes a long way — human faces are not a very forgiving canvas. I did appreciate that within the app there are explanations for every tool, as well as an ever-present option to compare what you’re working on to the original photo.

Other apps in this category include Phillips Zoom (whitening teeth) and moreBeaute2 (smoothing skin tone). Nokia also developed an app specifically for enhancing self-portraits taken with its Lumia devices called Glam Me.

Categorised as: Chief Digital Officer | Digital Media | Feedster

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