Smooth Skin and Face Retouch both improve skin in your photos, but they work differently and shine in different situations. This guide breaks down what sets them apart, so you can pick the right tool for each shoot.
At a glance
| Smooth Skin | Face Retouch | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Applies a mask over detected skin areas | Edits at the pixel level, through the Denoise layer in Adobe |
| Best for | High-volume galleries: weddings, events, documentary, school, and corporate photography | Portraits, headshots, and close-ups where facial detail matters |
| Project size | No set limit, built for large galleries | Up to 500 photos per project |
| Style options | Moderate, the default, or Custom, with control over texture, clarity, and sharpness | Clean, Polished, or Refined |
| What it targets | General skin smoothing across the detected area | Temporary blemishes, dark circles, and fine wrinkles, with built-in age-aware logic for children |
| Works with Denoise | Yes | No, choose one or the other |
When to use Smooth Skin
Smooth Skin is built for volume. It recognizes faces, marks them with an AI brush, and applies a consistent smoothing effect across your whole gallery. This makes it a great fit for weddings, events, documentary work, school photography, and corporate shoots, where you're editing hundreds or thousands of images and want a light, even improvement rather than detailed retouching on every face.
Because Smooth Skin applies one smoothing effect rather than making individual corrections, it's best used at a subtle to moderate intensity. Pushing it too far can start to soften skin texture more than you'd like.
When to use Face Retouch
Face Retouch works at a deeper level than Smooth Skin. Instead of applying a general mask, it makes targeted corrections, including reducing and brightening dark circles, softening wrinkles, and removing temporary blemishes like acne, all through your choice of Clean, Polished, or Refined styles. It also applies age-aware logic automatically, so children and infants get a lighter touch.
This makes Face Retouch the better choice for portraits, headshots, school portraits, and any shoot where facial detail is front and center and you want more precise results than a general smoothing pass can give you.
Keep in mind that Face Retouch has a 500-photo project limit, so for larger galleries, you'll need to split your project into batches. It also can't be applied to the same photo as Adobe Denoise. If you need both, you'll need to choose one.
Can I use both on the same gallery?
You can, but in our testing, adding Smooth Skin on top of Face Retouch rarely improves results that are already good, and stacking both increases the risk of overprocessed, overly smooth-looking skin. For most shoots, picking the tool that matches your photo type gives you the best result.