Filters and colour

5 topics from the in-app manual.

Using filters without ruining the photo

Stack several filters at once and you will never know which step ruined it.

1. Auto beautify (exposure and white balance as a base)

2. Brightness and contrast (only if still needed)

3. Hue and saturation (for colour casts)

4. Clarity or soften (finishing touch)

Shrink the result to phone size and look at it. If it still holds up small, it is fine.

Filters land on their own layer, so you can retune them or switch the whole layer off. Experiment freely

Focus blur / spotlight: act outside the painted area. Where you paint stays sharp

Desaturate: removes colour only where you paint; everything else is untouched

Soften: softens highlights, making skin look finer. Overdo it and the whole photo turns mushy

Clarity: adds midtone contrast, it is not sharpening. Stacking it with sharpening produces white halos

Focus blur and spotlight preserve the painted area; desaturate does the opposite and affects only that area.

Test a short stroke before covering a large region

Saturation: find the feel between +15 and +30. Past 40 it starts to look fake

Brightness: within ±10 is safest; past 20 detail starts to go

Contrast: +10 to +25

White balance: pull a yellow photo 5~10 toward cool, never all at once

Vibrance: lifts only low-saturation colours, leaving skin and lipstick alone. Safer than saturation

Do not raise brightness on an already blown-out photo — pull the highlights down first.

Blown highlights carry no detail, so brightening only gives you a white patch

Smart colour: analyses the frame and proposes a scheme. Leans toward "grading"

Auto beautify: exposure, contrast, white balance, vibrance and clarity at once. Leans toward "rescuing"

Flat, dark or colour-cast photo → auto beautify

Photo is fine, you want a style → smart colour

Try both and keep the better one. They are on separate layers anyway

Do not run auto beautify on a photo you already graded by hand — it pulls your grading back toward average

Both have checkboxes to disable individual steps. Unticking "clarity" in auto beautify,

for instance, makes the result noticeably more natural

Do not just drop saturation — that gives grey, not black and white.

Use the black-and-white filter, which redistributes greys by the luminance of each colour: skies go darker, skin goes brighter.

Portrait → Photo restore → Colourise. AI does it automatically in about five seconds (the first run loads the model).

First use "fill inside" to make the closed line art opaque, then colour — otherwise paint leaks outside the lines.

Push the monochrome contrast a little before colourising; the AI judges better that way