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• Face sculpting
• Open / closed mouth “check box”
• Touch-up and restore brushes
• Hair, glasses, jewelry, adornments

Face sculpting

Some faces are already extremely attractive, and in these cases you'll find that the control has little effect. In others, using the control too much can change the subject's appearance a little too much and you can risk changing their identity. To give you an idea of how this works, the features and attributes that sculpting measures and reacts to are:

• Positioning of eyes (how far apart, vertical symmetry, how widely opened)
  
• Lips: width, shape and degree of smile
  
• Noses: size, shape, position relative to eyes and mouth
  
• Bone structure: particularly cheek bones and jaw
  
• Overall length and width of the face
  
• Shape and definition of outer lines of the face
  

Therefore if your subject's eyes are quite close together, sculpting will move them slightly further apart - if the nose is quite large, sculpting will slightly reduce it and so on.

For portraits: if you prefer not to digitally alter your subject, leave the controls on zero! Remember that the feature is optional - we do not have an evil plan to morph the world toward perfection.

BUT: Note that 80%+ of our feedback on the sculpting has been highly positive. Used on lower levels you'll find that a slight enhancement can make a huge difference to the overall aesthetic result. Our aim is to create pictures which give the impression that the subject has been caught on her best day, looking absolutely fantastic but without looking "doctored". If you try using the feature gently you'll see what we mean, and if you're still not sure, do what we did and ask customers what they like. Our research shows that in the majority of cases people want to look great, and they don't mind a little digital help if it gives them a picture that they'll treasure.

Open / closed mouth “check box”

It's a common problem that people don't always smile when we want them to. Hence as part of the face sculpting feature we added a capability during August to force mouths open and display a pleasant toothy smile.

On the upside, this allows you display a happier face which the subject refused to supply themselves, which is useful in some shots. On the downside, in these cases we have to load in an appropriate set of digital "false teeth" which don't always look natural.

In some pictures the effect works really well, in others it doesn't. Use the check box as preferred to regulate this feature for the effect that you need.

Touch-up and restore brushes

Give them a go! On many images these are ideal for a few essential edits which add huge improvement to the overall image. These are:

• Using touch-up gently around the eyes. It'll get rid of wrinkles / crows feet, bags under the eyes etc, for a much fresher look. Several wedding photographers have commented that this is ideal for touching up pictures of the bride that are shot at receptions - how easily we forget that these ladies have been up for 15 hours and need a rest! Gentle touch-up puts the freshness back into the face without over-editing.”
• Blemishes: If your subject has individual imperfections that you want to remove without applying skin enhancement to the whole face, use the touchup brush to quickly zap the affected area.
• Chins: they come in all shapes and sizes and effects will vary so experiment with both brushes to optimize chin definition. Sometimes you may wish to remove or reduce the appearance of double chins or unwanted fat from the chin area, in which case you should use the touchup brush. Conversely, on occasion you will see that skin tone enhancement can slightly reduce definition of the jaw-line, so in these cases use the restore brush to put those attractive strong lines back in.

Hair, glasses, jewellery, adornments

MyPerfectPicture was designed with faces in mind, not accessories.

When you use the skin tone controls to enhance and smooth facial texture or remove imperfections, you'll find that on occasion it will gently blur the appearance of "non-skin" items such as glasses and thin strands of hair, necklaces and so forth. This is because the software has been trained to gently even out colors and tones.

When this happens, use the restore brush to correct any loss of definition. This is best done using CTRL to zoom in on the affected area.

Alternately, sometimes you'd rather just eliminate the odd unwanted wisp of hair that has blown across the face - in this case you should use the touchup brush to wipe it out.