I’ve been following Unmesh Dinda’s work on PiXimperfect for years now, and the man has a talent for making Photoshop do things it probably wasn’t designed to do. But this latest project is different. He’s gone beyond Photoshop tutorials and built an actual AI-powered retouching tool that tackles the kinds of edits that make even experienced retouchers groan.

The video is a full walkthrough of the tool in action, and after watching it twice, I want to break down what’s happening here — both the technical achievement and the broader implications for anyone who retouches professionally.

What the Tool Actually Does

The core pitch is straightforward: this AI handles retouching scenarios that are traditionally painful, time-consuming, or borderline impossible with standard tools. Unmesh demonstrates several examples throughout the video that illustrate the range.

He starts with stray hair removal — not the easy kind where a few hairs cross a clean background, but the nightmare scenario: fine hairs crossing textured skin, patterned clothing, and complex backgrounds simultaneously. The AI identifies the hair strands, understands what’s behind them, and reconstructs the underlying detail. If you’ve ever spent 45 minutes clone-stamping individual hairs across a jawline, you understand why this matters.

Then he moves to fabric wrinkle removal on clothing while preserving the natural drape and texture of the material. This is something Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill handles poorly because it doesn’t understand the difference between a wrinkle you want removed and a fold that’s part of the garment’s structure. Unmesh’s tool appears to distinguish between the two.

He also shows skin retouching that maintains pore-level texture — not the plastic, airbrushed look that frequency separation often produces when pushed too far, but genuine texture-preserving smoothing that looks like the person just has great skin.

The Technical Approach

From what Unmesh reveals in the video, the tool uses a custom-trained model rather than relying solely on Photoshop’s built-in AI features. He’s trained it on retouching-specific data, which means it understands the intent behind common retouching operations in a way that general-purpose AI doesn’t.

This is an important distinction. Photoshop’s Generative Fill is powerful, but it’s a generalist. It doesn’t know that when you select a blemish on skin, you want the surrounding skin texture to fill in seamlessly at pore level. It doesn’t know that removing a wrinkle from a shirt should preserve the weave pattern. Unmesh’s tool does, because that’s specifically what it was trained to do.

He runs several before-and-after comparisons against Photoshop’s native tools, and the differences are noticeable — particularly in edge cases where standard tools leave artifacts or produce unnatural-looking results.

The Ethics Conversation

Unmesh doesn’t shy away from the ethical dimension, which I respect. When AI can remove flaws this seamlessly, the line between “retouching” and “fabrication” gets blurrier. He makes the point that tools like this should serve the photographer’s intent, not replace their judgment.

I think that’s the right framework. A scalpel is more precise than a butter knife, but precision doesn’t eliminate the need for skill and restraint. Better tools should make good retouchers more efficient, not turn everyone into a retoucher regardless of whether they understand what they’re doing.

The concern I’d add: as retouching becomes easier and faster, the expectation from clients will shift. If AI can do in seconds what used to take an hour, clients will expect that speed without adjusting budgets. That’s a workflow economics problem, not a tool problem, but it’s worth thinking about.

What This Means for Working Retouchers

If you retouch professionally, tools like this aren’t a threat — they’re leverage. The tedious, repetitive parts of retouching (hair cleanup, fabric smoothing, background extension) are exactly where AI assistance makes sense. The creative decisions — how much to smooth, what to keep, what story the final image tells — remain human territory.

I’d watch this space carefully. Unmesh has a track record of building things that eventually influence what Adobe ships natively. His tutorials have literally shown up as feature requests that Adobe later implemented. If this custom retouching AI gains traction, don’t be surprised if something similar appears in Photoshop’s next major update.

Should You Care?

Yes. Even if you never use this specific tool, the approach it represents — task-specific AI trained on domain expertise rather than general-purpose generation — is where photo editing is heading. Understanding that trajectory now puts you ahead of the curve when these capabilities become standard.

Watch the full video below: