# StyleRetoucher: Generalized Portrait Image Retouching with GAN Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02546/) (2020)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (2017)
- [GAN Prior Embedded Network for Blind Face Restoration in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06070/) (2021)
- [Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14468/) (2020)
- [GLEAN: Generative Latent Bank for Large-Factor Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00739/) (2020)
- [STGAN: A Unified Selective Transfer Network for Arbitrary Image Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09709/) (2019)
- [Resolution Dependent GAN Interpolation for Controllable Image Synthesis Between Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05334/) (2020)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Video Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09909/) (2019)
- [Conditional Sequential Modulation for Efficient Global Image Retouching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10390/) (2020)
- [Real-time Image Enhancer via Learnable Spatial-aware 3D Lookup Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08697/) (2021)
- [HistoGAN: Controlling Colors of GAN-Generated and Real Images via Color Histograms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11731/) (2020)
- [JoJoGAN: One Shot Face Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11641/) (2021)
- [Joint Bilateral Learning for Real-time Universal Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10955/) (2020)
- [DrawingInStyles: Portrait Image Generation and Editing with Spatially Conditioned StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02762/) (2022)
- [Panini-Net: GAN Prior Based Degradation-Aware Feature Interpolation for Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08444/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning Adaptive Lighting via Channel-Aware Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01493/) (2024)
- [CameraMaster: Unified Camera Semantic-Parameter Control for Photography Retouching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21024/) (2025)
- [Before the Shutter: Aesthetic and Actionable Portrait Photography Planning in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30318/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Creating fine-retouched portrait images is tedious and time-consuming even for professional artists. There exist automatic retouching methods, but they either suffer from over-smoothing artifacts or lack generalization ability. To address such issues, we present StyleRetoucher, a novel automatic portrait image retouching framework, leveraging StyleGAN's generation and generalization ability to improve an input portrait image's skin condition while preserving its facial details. Harnessing the priors of pretrained StyleGAN, our method shows superior robustness: a). performing stably with fewer training samples and b). generalizing well on the out-domain data. Moreover, by blending the spatial features of the input image and intermediate features of the StyleGAN layers, our method preserves the input characteristics to the largest extent. We further propose a novel blemish-aware feature selection mechanism to effectively identify and remove the skin blemishes, improving the image skin condition. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations validate the great generalization capability of our method. Further experiments show StyleRetoucher's superior performance to the alternative solutions in the image retouching task. We also conduct a user perceptive study to confirm the superior retouching performance of our method over the existing state-of-the-art alternatives.