ArcSoft Perfect365

Those glossy, glamorous portraits you see everywhere have been heavily digitally retouched. ArcSoft's Perfect365 is a free photo-editing application that is optimized for retouching, airbrushing, and enhancing portraits and other facial shots, but it also works on group portraits or any digital snapshot, for that matter. What it does best is make it easy to achieve the look you see on magazine covers and Web sites in your own photos. With it, you can give digital makeovers to yourself and your friends.

Perfect365 opens with a splash screen demonstrating before-and-after images with a series of stock photos; we could also open any of our own images, go to Favorites, load the last photo we'd worked on, and even access Twitter and Facebook. We opened one of the sample images, a high-resolution portrait. Perfect365's main view displayed the photo in the center, with a scrolling Instant Look panel on the left that let us quickly apply a wide range of looks suitable for day, evening, night, and other options. On the right, a series of check boxes let us select a wide range of corrections and processes to apply, grouped under Skin, Face, Eyes, and Mouth -- everything from whitening teeth to shaping eyebrows and adding foundation. Most tools, such as the Eye Liner and Blush tools, have options and settings that pop up when you select them; others apply themselves automatically. Perfect365 has some interesting extras, too, such as automatic Instant Multi-Face Detection, which can distinguish up to 20 faces in a group image, even if some are obscured.

Perfect365 is based on ArcSoft's image-editing tools, so it offers many standard features like zoom and undo as well as specialized tools such as the Adjust Key Points tool or the button for switching rapidly between Before and After views. When we created a look we liked, we could save it or share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr after we'd entered our account information via a simple pop-up wizard. Perfect365 is easy to use, totally free, and lots of fun.