GIMP has made easy for you to remove blemishes by providing Healing Tool. This tutorial will show you how to remove facial blemishes in GIMP using this tool.

GIMP itself has famously been known as the best free alternative to Photoshop. Just like Photoshop, GIMP can also be used as a photo retouching tool and image manipulation tool. Removing facial blemishes is not that hard in GIMP thanks to the availability of the Healing Tool. In addition to removing blemishes, we will also redden (brighten up) the lips of the portrait we use as the example. Following is the portrait we are going to use as the example on this tutorial. If you want to use the same portrait, you can download it on Unsplash.

Here is how to remove facial blemishes in GIMP.

• Launch GIMP and ope the portrait you want to remove the blemishes from.
• Duplicate the layer of the portrait (Shift+Ctrl+D).

• With the duplicated layer selected, activate the Healing Tool by clicking its icon on the Toolbox (H).

• Press the Ctrl key on keyboard and click on a non blemish area. This will be used to replace the blemishes.
• Now click the black spots (the blemishes). Do this step thoroughly until all blemishes are gone.

• Once done removing the black spots, duplicate the top layer twice.
• Disable the visibility of the top layer and the bottom layer by clicking the the eye icon and select the second layer (second from above).

• Go to Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and set the X and Y size to about 25. Click the OK button to apply the filter.

• Select the top layer, enable its visibility, and change its mode to Grain Extract.

• Right click the top layer and select New from Visible.

• Merge down the layer above (right-click and select Merge Down) and change its mode to Grain Extract.

• Duplicate the third layer (third from above) and drag the duplicated layer to the top.
• Select the top layer and go to Colors -> Hue-Saturation. Set the Saturation to 100 and click OK.

• Still on top layer, create a layer mask to this layer. To do so, right-click the layer and select Add Layer Mask. Set the Initialize Layer Mask option to Black (full transparency). Click Add.

• Activate the Eraser Tool on the Toolbox and draw on the lips.

Following is the example of the result of this tutorial.

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