Face-aware Fluid Warp in Paint by Zaweba
Place the Face Guide by hand in Paint by Zaweba's Fluid Warp, then adjust eyes, nose, mouth, smile, chin, jawline and face width with sliders.
Pushing pixels around a face with a liquify brush takes a steady hand and a lot of patience. Inside Fluid Warp, Paint by Zaweba offers a gentler route: a Face Guide that you place over the face, and a set of sliders that change its features in proportion.
Placing the Face Guide
Press G inside Fluid Warp for the Face Guide. You place it by hand. Drag an oval round the face, then drag the eyes, nose and mouth markers onto the matching features. Faces are not found automatically, and that is deliberate. Paint by Zaweba has no AI services and no telemetry, and it does not try to detect people in your pictures. You say where the face is, and the sliders work from that.
Placing the guide takes a few seconds and pays off in accuracy. Take care with the eyes and the corners of the mouth, since those are what most sliders work from.
The sliders
Once the guide is in place, sliders change the face.
For the eyes: size, height, width, tilt and distance apart. For the nose: height and width. For the mouth: smile, upper lip, lower lip, mouth width and mouth height. For the face shape: forehead, chin height, jawline and face width.
Each slider moves the pixels in the right area in a smooth, balanced way, so a change to eye size affects both eyes evenly and blends into the surrounding skin.
What it is good for
Light retouching is the honest use. A smile that was caught a moment too early can be lifted slightly. Eyes that are half closed in an otherwise perfect group shot can be opened a touch. A face distorted by a wide angle lens close to the camera can be eased back towards its real proportions with face width and jawline. A head tilted so one eye looks smaller can be evened out.
It is also useful for illustration and caricature, where exaggeration is the point. Push eye size and face width well past natural and you have a playful cartoon look.
Restraint is the skill
Faces are what we are best at reading, and small changes show. A slider moved a few steps often looks better than one moved a long way. A good method is to push a slider until the change is obviously too much, then bring it back to well under half of that. Look at the face at normal size, not zoomed in, and compare with the original.
Consider who is in the picture and what they would want. Retouching someone's features without their agreement, or presenting a heavily changed face as natural, is something to think twice about.
Combining with the other Fluid Warp tools
The sliders handle overall changes. For anything they do not cover, the regular Fluid Warp brushes are still there in the same window: Forward warp for a stray strand of hair, Freeze to protect the background, Reconstruct to soften an area that went too far. Everything you do in the Fluid Warp window, sliders and brushes together, is one undo step back in the editor.
Things to check before leaving
Look at the background near the face. Edges of door frames, collars and earrings can bend when features change; freeze them if needed. Check that both sides of the face still match. And flip the view to see the face mirrored, which shows lopsided changes immediately.
Face-aware Fluid Warp makes subtle portrait corrections practical without handing your pictures to an online service, which is exactly why it lives inside Paint by Zaweba.
