Quick Links What Is Aperty? What Is Retouch4Me? Platform support Interface and Ease of Use Facial Retouching Eyes Color Body Enhancements Aperty vs. Retouch4Me: Which Gives the Best Results?
AI-powered portrait editing has made professional results more accessible than ever, but not all are created equal. Aperty and Retouch4Me are two standout options, each offering unique strengths. But which one's the best when it comes to the results?
What Is Aperty?
Aperty is a portrait-focused photo editing tool, provided by Skylum, the creators of Luminar Neo. Although Aperty is an AI editing software, it has a subtle integration of AI tools, slightly different from Luminar Neo's GenSwap or GenRemove features. Aperty works as a standalone desktop tool or as a plugin integration for Photoshop and Lightroom.
You can subscribe to Aperty on a monthly or annual basis. Monthly costs $29.95 and to subscribe for a year is $299. Skylum do occasionally put their products on sale, so you may be able to get Aperty for less than this price.
What Is Retouch4Me?
Retouch4Me is an AI-focused photo-editing and video-editing tool which applies subtle editing at a click. You can access individual photography plugins as standalone tools, congregate your purchased plugins into Retouch4Me's Arams hub, use Retouch4Me's Photoshop plugin panel, or as an extension in Lightroom and Capture One.
Retouch4Me plugins are available for individual purchase -- so you only own the ones you'll need in your workflow -- and come with lifetime free updates. The prices vary from around $125-$180, with occasional sales. They're pricey, but it's a one-time cost, so you'll never have to pay more.
Now you know more about each of these two AI-portrait-editing software, you can directly compare their offerings.
Platform support
Both software can be used on Windows and Mac systems as standard. There's no Linux or tablet-based support for either. Both tools work offline, but Retouch4Me plugins must be installed and activated first.
Aperty offers standalone apps for Windows (Windows 10 or higher) and Mac (MacOS 12 or higher), along with plugins for both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. There's also a further extension for you to use Aperty with the Apple Photos app from Mac.
Retouch4Me can be used by each individual plugin as a standalone tool; with the Arams hub, your purchased plugins appear in one place for use (Arams is compatible with Windows 7 and higher and MacOS 10.14 and above); or integrated into other software with Retouch4Me's Photoshop plugin panel or extensions in Lightroom and Capture One.
Interface and Ease of Use
Aperty has a simple and inviting interface with obvious icons and helpful tooltip labels. It presents basic camera information above the image -- ISO, focal length, aperture, and shutter speed -- and all the tools you'll need are in easy-to-navigate menus on the right-hand side.
Retouch4Me's Arams hub works as a central holding pot for your purchased product plugins. You don't have to use Arams, as the products can be accessed individually or integrated into other tools. Arams just saves hassle.
Arams offers a simple interface, but it's slightly more cluttered than Aperty's. Arams has menus on both the left and right-hand sides of your image and a large image thumbnail below, meaning less space to view your portrait. Aperty's tools work simply by selecting a checkmark and moving a slider.
Facial Retouching
Facial retouching tools largely consist of skin smoothing, blemish removal, and skin tone evening. The Heal and Dodge & Burn tools are also used frequently for facial retouching.
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Aperty's Retouch category is for editing and retouching portrait facial features. They work subtly with both effects sliders and detail sliders.
The Skin Blemish option lets you remove blemishes or freckles and enhance detail. The Face Skin option lets you to smooth skin, as well as correct the facial skin color. There's also a dark circles removal for the under-eye area, and finally within the skin details are options to brighten the skin and remove shine. The results are subtle, yet noticeable, ensuring there's no over-smoothing or unrealistic results.
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Using Arams by Retouch4Me, you can select all plugins you wish to apply at the same time. For the retouching experiment, I selected Heal, Mattifier, Dodge Burn, Skin Tone, and Skin Mask.
I didn't mind the results in Retouch4Me; however, it did apply some unnatural smoothing to where the light fell on the model's face, causing a matte area over her nose instead of being brighter from the lighting.
Winner: Aperty
Eyes
Aperty's Eyes section is within the Retouch category. For this portrait, I used the Dark Circles Removal tool again, before choosing some of the Eyes features.
Using the dropdown menu, I chose to set the Iris Color to brown -- the same as the model's original eye color -- for more texture and depth, then I increased the Iris Visibility and Flare for a more natural result. These are interesting and specific options to have.
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I used the Eye Whitening and Eye Enhancement sliders -- the most similar to Retouch4Me's eye tools -- to add a little brightening to the eyes.
Aperty also has eye makeup features, and eye reshaping features. I used these subtly too by enhancing the eyebrows since the model's were quite light against her skintone. I didn't see a difference using the Eyeliner tool.
Under the Reshape tab, I moved the eyebrows slightly further apart but kept everything else the same. The results are subtle but add a nice highlight to the eyes.
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Retouch4Me has two eye enhancing tools -- Eye Vessels and Eye Brilliance -- and they both come as part of the Eyes Bundle.
There's also a Portrait Volumes plugin which affects the eyes in a portrait along with other elements like lip and nose shape and overall face shape. I just applied the two Eye tools to my portrait, as I didn't want to affect the skin or face.
The original portrait didn't show any visible blood vessels in the eye, so it's difficult to see what or how the plugin affected the eyes. The eyes were transformed with brightness, though.
The whites do look somewhat unrealistic, but the eyes do pop as a result. I brought the sliders lower down for a small improvement without being over-the-top. The results look a little unnatural but can be dialled down further.
Winner: Aperty
Color
Aperty has many color tools, including white balance and color tint sliders. It also features a host of presets which affect color, including creative presets.
Within the lighting controls, you can add source lighting for extra jazz to your portraits. This replicates a lighting rig; you can choose the color/hue, intensity, and direction.
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The Retouch4Me suite doesn't offer the same color tools as Aperty. You can get a free and paid Color Match plugin, which lets you match colors from a reference image to your source image. There's also a LUT creator plugin and LUT presets which are all purchased separately, and, as such, I don't have access to them for comparison.
Of course, you can use Retouch4Me as a plugin or extension to other photo-editing software to use color tools elsewhere instead of directly.
Winner: Aperty
Body Enhancements
Aperty has its own body section under the Reshape tab. These AI tools have sliders for Body Shape and Abdomen. I personally dislike these tools and think they could be damaging -- not least because the abdomen slider starts at 0 on one end, and only goes up, decreasing the shape or size of the abdomen, suggesting that models should always look skinnier.
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The Shape slider has 0 in the middle and can get both bigger and smaller. I think the results are a little unrealistic and lean too heavily into the fashion industry's desire for models to look smaller. This is one problem I've seen in other AI photo-editing tools -- warping images can lead to unrealistic body expectations.
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Retouch4Me has some subtle body-area tools, none of which affect the size of a model's body.
The main one you can apply to the body is the Fabric plugin -- this is targeted towards cleaning up fabric creases and shadows for better presentation. It works subtly but successfully, and doesn't insult a model's body.
Winner: Retouch4Me
Aperty vs. Retouch4Me: Which Gives the Best Results?
Aperty provides a wider range of tools, and thus, slightly better results. Aperty's interface is easier to navigate, and the results render faster than Retouch4Me's. The subtlety of Rectouch4Me's tools can be too subtle. When editing aspects you want to drastically change, it's hard to see desired results.
However, some of Aperty's Reshape features are too gimmicky, and I wouldn't use them for serious portrait editing. Overall, I was more pleased with my results using Aperty than I was using Retouch4Me.