How to put a smile on someones face in a picture

Perhaps the most important part of a picture is your smile, as it can convey so many different things. Is it forced? Posed? Flirtatious? Are you laughing? Is it natural and welcoming? Subtle and shy?

Because your smile is such an expressive part of your face, it can be super annoying when someone takes a photo and you're not ready for it. You might be caught with a weird half-smile on your face, or perhaps you seem more sullen than you intended. Either way, not the cutest.

You might be tempted to destroy all evidence of your wonky grin, but wait a minute! You don't have to delete that photo. All you need to do to give yourself a better smile is use Facetune2, which allows you to edit your smile in any photo.

Here's our step-by-step guide to getting that picture-perfect smile every time.

Step 1 – Open the photo you want to edit in Facetune2.

Step 2 – On the main menu, choose the Face feature, and then select Smile from the raised menu. Next, use the slider to bring the corners of your mouth up, increasing your smile. You can also use the Smirk feature to subtly edit the edges of your mouth.

Step 3 – If your lips disappear when you smile, you can use the Lips function to bring your lips back.

Step 4 – If your teeth are showing, head to the main menu and select the Retouch feature, then choose the Whiten tool. Next, sweep your finger over your teeth, and then use the slide bar to brighten and whiten your teeth.

Step 5 – If you want to edit specific parts of your smile, you can use the Reshape functions. Make sure you use a very light touch when using these tools. Use the Compare tool in the left corner to see the original photo and check that your edits are simply enhancing your natural face, not changing it completely.

Make sure you save your edited photo to your phone, or you'll lose all your hard work!

Before Facetune2:

After Facetune2:

If you think your smile looks awkward or unnatural in a photo, a few subtle tweaks can completely change your face. You don't need to make massive edits, just some little touch-ups and you can be confident once again that your smile is your most wonderful feature!

2017 may be the year the US starts a nuclear war because someone tweets something mean about Donald Trump, but at least we’re getting some weird selfie apps before we go. Earlier this month we had Meitu, which made you look like a terrifying anime character and possibly tracked your location data, and this week we have FaceApp, which uses neural networks to paste a smile on anybody’s photo and possibly steals your soul or something.

The app is iOS only and very hit-and-miss. You can see it did quite a good job with Trump up top, but that’s because his face is quite small in the photo, he doesn’t have a beard, and he’s looking straight at the camera. Add in any of these elements, and the results become much less convincing, as with Wesley Snipes below:

Adding smiles isn’t all the app can do, though. You can also make people old, young, male, female, and “hot.” (Like Meitu, this mainly makes you skin paler; an example of the often racist association of paleness with beauty.) The gender swapping is perhaps the most interesting feature, and often turns out some quite convincing results. But for some reason, you can only access it in “collage” mode, meaning the resulting images are quite small.

FaceApp isn’t anything more than a fun distraction, but it does demonstrate something we’ve written about before: how artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to morph and manipulate photos.

As with Russian app Prisma, which uses an AI technique named “style transfer” to make selfies look like famous paintings, FaceApp is leveraging the power of neural networks; sending images to the cloud to transform them. With Prisma, its creators slowly improved the app by making the neural nets faster, adding more filters, and allowing the software to run locally on users’ phones. Then Google announced it had created similar software; then Facebook. It’s not impossible that FaceApp could make a similar journey to the mainstream, although modifying photos in this way is trickier than style transfer, and might be too taxing to work locally.

Yaroslav Goncharov, an ex-Yandex exec and CEO of the Russian company that created the app, Wireless Lab, told The Verge that an Android version of FaceApp is already in alpha and should be out soon. He said that the neural networks involved were trained by Wireless Lab “from scratch” and claimed that no other commercial products offered photo modifications as good. (Although there have been similar research prototypes, like Tom White’s SmileVector.)

Goncharov also confirmed that photos uploaded to the app are stored on the company’s servers to save bandwidth if several filters are applied, but get deleted not long after. And, he added, unlike the Meitu app, FaceApp doesn’t require any weird system permissions or track data like GPS. New filters will be coming to successive versions of the app, including some emulating photo effects like bokeh and different lighting setups.

If you try out the app yourself and create any good examples, do drop them in the comments below.

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