PhotoDiva Review: A Free, Beginner-Friendly AI Portrait Editor?

Considering how many online AI retouching tools there are, a desktop-focused one is a welcome addition to the market. Enter PhotoDiva.

But if that wasn’t enough, PhotoDiva claims to achieve flawless edits with ease, all through its advanced AI.

So, is it for you? Read on to see what this tool has to offer and who might get the most use out of it in our PhotoDiva review.

Compatibility & Getting Started

As I mentioned, PhotoDiva is a desktop-focused app designed for Windows systems. However, a stripped-down version of the tool, with many of the key features, is also available for the iPhone, so Apple enthusiasts won’t miss out.

From the get-go, the pricing and licensing proposition is a bit unique here as the tool offers a perpetual license, meaning you pay once and get to use the app forever.

When compared to common editing tools like Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, this can mean significant savings.

Of course, none of this matters if the tool’s features aren’t any good, so let’s check them out.

Basic Retouching Features

Automatic Editing

One of the main draws to using AI is that it can apply a solid foundation of editing options with one click of a button, and this is also PhotoDiva’s headline feature.

What you get is a descriptive menu with a wealth of options that will automatically apply settings (and provide a preview of how they look) to the entire image.

Notably, there’s an “overall enhancement” option, which is something that you might end up using once or twice when you need to get an image done in seconds. It applies a few different filters, namely reducing the contrast and glare, as well as smoothing the face up a bit.

What truly impressed me here is that the AI consistently detects facial features and seems to know their context and how to improve them “optimally.” After a few lousy editors that might make faces look like cardboard cutouts or plastic dolls, PhotoDiva still leaves it looking natural.

I should point out that the Auto-Retouch features cover most of what the app can do, with settings tuned to keep edits subtle and avoid an overprocessed look.

That being said, some of the presets ended up looking indistinguishable from one another, largely due to the pre-existing lighting conditions of the image. As such, how much improvement you get from the presets depends on the quality of the original (the worse it is, the starker the difference).

What I did find immensely helpful was the detailed comparison and history tool. The app saves all the changes, and it can revert them one at a time, as well as present a side-by-side comparison of the original vs. the edited version.

It allows you to spot changes as they’re made rather than using the AI once, hoping for the best, then regenerating the result if needed.

Skin Retouching and Smoothing

Apart from the generalist changes, what has surprised me is PhotoDiva’s ability to smooth faces without going overboard.

Even with the preset option, the result you get is pretty natural-looking, similar to applying makeup on the subject.

As you can see, the tool mainly removes excess wrinkles and freckles while muting the color and brightness across the entire face.

The tool wasn’t quite perfect in removing the veins on the forehead, but that only leads to a slightly more natural result.

While I was happy with most of the results I received, I did notice that the tool sometimes struggled with noses. In some cases, the overcorrection led to the nose losing its dimensionality and looking like a 2D object stuck onto the face or plastered on.

Additionally, the tool doesn’t touch the neck section at all if you’re using the free version. This can lead to some jarring discrepancies between the jawline and the neck, especially if you’re taking pictures of older people.

The “facial retouching” option also includes a healing brush, which mutes the color contrast and removes obvious defects on the skin (such as acne, scars, or marks). Although the tool works quite well for small blemishes, it can be cumbersome to use for minute details or large ones.

Teeth Whitening

If there’s one area where AI can be hit-or-miss, it’s the teeth.

Most AIs struggle to properly detect where the teeth end and the gums begin, or where the gaps between the teeth are. In some cases, free AI tools will basically make a jawline-wide white veneer over the teeth to make it one smooth, ugly surface.

With PhotoDiva, that problem is practically gone.

The “whiten teeth” mode (which is applied to several other presets) creates natural-looking teeth. The whitening isn’t even throughout, but fades slowly from the tooth to the gum, usually preserving the shadows created by the lips.

Do note that the position of the mouth and how widely it’s open can lead to vastly different results, but the average one is quite good.

Additionally, if the teeth have a notable dark spot like a stain or filling, it might be better to apply a separate layer of whitening manually beforehand, focusing on that spot. Otherwise, AI can sometimes ignore obvious discrepancies or overcorrect the rest of the teeth.

Face Sculpting

This is one of the more interesting features to play with, and the one where I repeatedly needed to remind myself that I’m testing the tool and not going overboard.

With this, you get a true feeling that the AI can accurately detect and manipulate the contours of every part of the face. This becomes obvious once you see the level of detail you can manipulate on the face.

While some of the options look a bit banal and usually don’t make for good photos, small corrections (in the below-20 range) can often add up and create a marked difference in the look and “feel” of the facial structure.

What impressed me was the “face width” slider. Unlike most AI editors, this one doesn’t touch the proportions of the top of the skull. Instead, it slims the jaw but keeps the result looking natural.

Eye and Hair Color Changes

Out of all facial editing options, these turned out to be the most lackluster, as the lack of details kills the ability to make meaningful edits.

The tool guides you in making a “mask” over the eyes or hair, which is then used to apply a different color or shade to the entire object while keeping the lighting and contrast intact.

However, for most of my efforts, the colors that the platform suggests are garish and unnatural, and they often imply much higher levels of lighting than in the original image.

If you do decide to test these out, you’ll need to be patient and move slowly to ensure the mask is drawn properly. Luckily, there’s an “undo” option in the Eraser tool to readjust the mask, but the process can still be tedious.

Body Retouching

Apart from adjusting facial features, PhotoDiva can also process whole-body shots and make slight modifications to a person’s build.

This includes muscles, leg-to-torso proportions, and reshaping the limbs.

However, this portion is something I had a lot of trouble with.

For example, the muscle enhancement section is really barebones. The tool comes with a single “brush” that is applied over a part of the body, and moving the slider expands it a bit in all directions.

The result is that in order to get a noticeable improvement (and still keep it natural), you need to repeatedly apply small changes across the body. This is particularly noticeable if the model doesn’t have visible muscles that can be enhanced and needs to be literally sculpted.

On the plus side, the tool does have quite a bit of granular control, and it does seem to recognize where the body ends and the background begins.

In my testing, when I tried to make the brush larger than the muscle I was changing (such as the subject’s arms on a faraway shot), the tool intelligently expanded the affected muscle and its immediate surroundings but didn’t distort the background in the process.

There’s also an option to slim the waist, but it simply refused to work for me in any meaningful capacity. As soon as the model was slightly turned to one side, it was impossible to align the guiding lines with the actual waist.

And then when the AI started slimming the waist, even a single-digit reduction completely distorted the proportions of the body.

Overall, I’d stick to changing the muscles and the leg-to-torso ratio, as there’s some ability to apply fine control to the process.

Additional Tools

Digital Makeup

PhotoDiva’s makeup editing suite is one of the few features that are completely reliant on purchasing the “PRO” version.

The suite allows you to apply pretty much every type of makeup to the face and play with color, shade, contours, and intensity of each of the elements.

When done properly, the makeup can look natural, but be warned that this takes quite a bit of practice to achieve, and my initial results looked more “clown” than makeup.

The eyeshadow in particular can look too cartoonish or apply unnatural-looking colors to the center of the face, where they start clashing with the rest of the composition.

One nice thing about the makeup tool is that you get a full preview of how each element will look before you apply it, allowing you to make changes on the go rather than fully committing.

Filters

Apart from basic editing options like cropping, brightness, or color correction, PhotoDiva includes filters that automatically apply to the entire image based on your preferences and the AI’s processing.

The filters here range from what you commonly see on social media, such as changing the photo to look like a particular camera model or style, to artificially aging the photo and adding realistic damage from supposed wear and tear.

Although some of the filters are available for use in the free version, the entire gallery is unlocked with a PRO purchase, but that’s not that much of a draw compared to other standalone features like makeup changes and the healing brush.

Performance

Using the tool is remarkably easy, as it can import a wide array of formats and export images that can be further processed by professional editing tools (or just put up on social media).

As mentioned, you get a full history of changes and can see the difference between the current result and the original image side-by-side (while still being able to zoom). Then, the tool can apply changes one by one until you get a satisfactory result.

However, what I did have an issue with was processing times.

In some cases, the tool would stutter to the point where it was impossible to see what was being changed. On a few occasions, trying to change the size and shape of limbs completely crashed the application.

So if you decide to use the tool for longer periods, make sure to save your progress after every few changes. The platform can’t recover an in-progress image, and you’d have to start from scratch.

Pricing and Who Is PhotoDiva For

Price-wise, the main draw to PhotoDiva is that the bulk of the tool is free, and you can use it to great effect without purchasing a license.

But even if you want some of the additional features, the buy-once-keep-forever model paired with a modest price (as the most expensive feature suite costs less than $50 on sale) makes this one of the most budget-friendly editing options.

Of course, the range of the tools and the quality of the features pales in comparison to something like Adobe Photoshop, but the added convenience and streamlined ease-of-use mean that you can give this a shot and likely not be disappointed.

Overall, I’d recommend this tool if you want good-quality photos improved slightly while not taking a lot of your time. The AI enhancements consistently work as expected, and most edits still create natural-looking results.

The images you get will usually be worthy of social media posts and perhaps even personal image galleries. However, if you want a truly professional-grade experience, you’re better off learning to work in Photoshop or another complete photo editing suite.