For me, there are two heavy hitters in the AI retouching market: Evoto and Retouch4me. But is one better than the other?

While both have the ability to leverage AI to speed up your retouching process, one of these definitely has more capability over the other. But where one software lacks in capability, it shines in convenience while still maintaining great quality. So let’s dive into each software a bit and see what they can do (and can’t do), as well as see why I think there’s a place for both within your retouching workflow.

Evoto

As a whole, Evoto is a much more capable piece of software. Not only does it have the ability to do AI retouching, but it could also fully replace Lightroom/Capture One if you so wished. When you first dive into the software, you’ll see a home screen-style layout where you can create a new project or access older projects. Once you enter a project, you’ll have a handful of tabs that you can use to edit your photos. The first tab is a traditional RAW editor-style setup where you can do things like exposure, white balance, curves, HSL, etc. There is also access to features like filters, presets, and other AI-enhanced tools to edit images. Although these seem like decent enough functionalities, I haven’t seen anything worth pulling me away from Lightroom or Capture One, so I won’t spend a ton of time talking about this part of the software.

From here, the rest of the tabs are mostly for retouching-type adjustments. These are broken down into tabs for Portrait Retouching, Background Adjustments, and Clothing. There are also tabs for cropping and tethering that we won’t get into, but if you do any type of tethering, you definitely want to check out the abilities on offer from Evoto.

Our main focus, though, is going to be within the portrait retouching section. Within this tab, you will find a host of different categories, from blemish removal to facial shaping to makeup and hair. Within each category, there are various sliders that can be used to make adjustments. Some of these adjustments are broad, affecting things like all visible skin, while others are so narrow in focus that you can adjust just the look of the vessels within someone’s eyes.

There are so many sliders and different adjustments that I haven’t really had the need to touch probably half of them. But for me, this is actually where I find Evoto the most useful. Because there is the ability to retouch almost every aspect of an image, it’s rare that I find an image where something I need to retouch can’t simply be done with a slider within Evoto. So, although I retouch entire galleries for things like dodge and burn, heal, skin tone, etc., I don’t actually use Evoto for those things (more on why further down). Instead, I use Evoto for the problem images that need a little more love and care, but I don’t want to spend the time to do manually within Photoshop.

A prime example is stray hair removal and the removal of wrinkles from clothes. This process takes a lot of time when done manually, and if you have more than a couple of images, that time can add up quickly. Thankfully, Evoto has a simple slider you can use to remove all the stray hair from an image and reduce and remove wrinkles. The thing I love most about these sliders is that you have the ability to fine-tune them as needed. It’s not a simple on/off. So while I normally take both sliders to 100 percent, there are occasions where it gives an artificial look to the retouch. In those cases, I can simply dial back the adjustment until it looks how I want. For the wrinkles in clothes, I also enjoy that it knows which wrinkles to keep to maintain the shape and natural fall of the clothes and then remove or minimize the other wrinkles.

Another amazing slider is for glasses glare. This one alone is worth having some Evoto credits on hand if you photograph any type of portraits. While I knew it was good from some demos I saw at a recent conference, I hadn’t actually run into an instance where I needed to use it until about a week ago when I was taking images for a local school. I didn’t realize how bad the glare was on a teacher’s glasses until it was too late to make the required adjustments to the lighting and her pose to minimize the glare. This left me with having to fix it in post. I honestly didn’t even try Evoto at first because I simply thought the glare was too bad for it to handle. I tried the manual way in Photoshop with terrible results. As a last-ditch effort, I tried Evoto, and I was honestly surprised at how well it handled such a bad glare.

So, because the results that Evoto gives are absolutely amazing, you may wonder why I don’t use the software for all of my AI retouching. In case you missed my mention of it earlier, Evoto runs off a credit-based system. This means that the software is free to download and free to use and edit within as much as you’d like. But as soon as you want to export an image, you have to pay a credit. The good/bad thing here, though, is that it’s one credit per export whether you adjust one slider or every slider in the software. So, if you are trying to fix a small handful of images, this is totally great. But if you are trying to retouch an entire wedding gallery, this could get really expensive really fast, which is where Retouch4me comes in.

Retouch4me

At the beginning, Retouch4me could seem a bit confusing because they have several ways to access and run their tools. The first way is through Photoshop plugins. These are purchased individually and can be run through Lightroom, Photoshop, or each plugin’s launcher. This is great if you are trying to edit within Photoshop and want to use a plugin to help speed up your workflow but also still want access to everything else Photoshop can do for the rest of your manual editing.

Next, Retouch4me offers a standalone software called Arams that is somewhat like Evoto but with a lot less functionality. At its core, you still have the ability to create new projects and open old projects. Both software programs also allow you to batch-process a set of images. Where Retouch4me differs is that while they offer a similar credit-based editing approach to Evoto, Retouch4me also gives you the ability to completely buy each plugin and use them as much as you’d like. This is a much more cost-effective way to batch retouch large sets of images.

In the software, one thing you’ll notice is that by default, you won’t see what effects the plugins are having on your images as you adjust sliders. To see what the retouch will look like before you export, you’ll need to pre-render the images. For me, this isn’t a big deal because I’m mostly using Retouch4me as a bulk retouching part of my workflow, so I’m not making adjustments on an image-to-image basis. But if you want to use Retouch4me and make adjustments to each image, it’s worth noting that when you turn on the option to use the re-rendered preview, the dodge and burn plugin becomes unavailable. I’ve only tested this on the plugins I own, so other plugins might suffer from the same issue.

Which Is Better?

If I had to pick one over the other in terms of quality and functionality, I’d go with Evoto. This software just has so much more potential. There is better integration for previewing results, and I think the actual results are a bit better. Below is an example of only applying blemish removal to the same photo, and as you can see, the results from Evoto are better overall.

Evoto Left, Retouch4me Right

Unfortunately for Evoto, more comes into play than having options and quality results. Because Evoto strictly runs off a credit-based system, you have to be particular about which images you run through the program. This is totally fine if you are the type of photographer to only retouch a handful of images from a session and call it good. Using 10–15 credits per session, you could make a credit package last for over 100 sessions. But if you’re like me and want to retouch every image from a wedding, you could eat through $500 worth of credits in about four weddings. That $500 could easily purchase the four main plugins from Retouch4me that I use. And although the results from Evoto are better, the results from Retouch4me are still really good.

What I Liked – Evoto

• Tons of options
• Quick previews of results
• Free to try and play around with

What I Liked – Retouch4me

• Easy batch editng
• Ability to use via credits or to fully purchase a plugin
• Ability to use within Photoshop and Lightroom as a traditional plugin 

What I Didn’t Like – Evoto

• Credit-based system can get expensive over time depending on how you want to integrate retouching into your workflow
• Could feel like too many options if you are just diving into what’s possible

What I Didn’t Like – Retouch4me

• Not as many options, especially for unique problem areas like stray hairs and glasses glare
• The ability to preview results before export could be better.

Conclusion

While I think Evoto is a bit better, I also think Retouch4me is a bit more practical for the everyday working photographer. So for me, I’m going to stick with using both. Retouch4me will be my main retouching AI for basically every image I deliver. But for images that require more work outside of what’s possible with Retouch4me, I’ll use Evoto. At the end of the day, I think it’s worth having both options and using them together. Each software fills in gaps the other may leave, and together, they create a well-rounded retouching workflow that’s efficient and cost-effective.