There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from a streamlined workflow, especially when you work in the fast-paced world of portrait and headshot photography. When clients expect a polished product quickly, you don’t always have the luxury of diving into every layer or adjustment mask. That’s where tools like Retouch4me Apex promise to be game-changers. I’ve tested a lot of retouching solutions over the years, and I was already impressed with Retouch4me’s standalone plugins. So when they launched Retouch4me Apex, an all-in-one Photoshop plugin and standalone app designed to handle the entire portrait retouching process in one pass, I had to try it.

This review covers my hands-on experience using Apex in a real-world portrait studio workflow. I’ll walk through where it excels, where it could be better, and whether it fits into the daily grind of high-volume professional retouching.

What Is Apex?

Apex is essentially the greatest hits of Retouch4me’s plugin library, Heal, Dodge & Burn, Eye Vessels, Portrait Volumes, and others, all bundled into a single, unified interface. It’s available as both a Photoshop plugin and a standalone application.

Unlike most Photoshop plugins, Apex offloads the processing to the cloud. This frees up your system resources, which can be a huge plus when you’re dealing with dozens or even hundreds of client images. Of course, that means you’ll need a stable internet connection to use it.

First Impressions: Clean, Intuitive, and Surprisingly Fast

Launching Apex through Photoshop, I was greeted with a minimal but efficient UI. It scans the image and auto-detects areas like skin, eyes, clothing, and background.

In my tests with headshots and personal branding portraits, Apex applied a full-body retouch instantly. The smart defaults hit the usual suspects: skin cleanup, eye brightening, teeth whitening, smoothing clothes, and refining the backdrop. Each element is adjustable via sliders in realtime, making it easy to dial in the look you want quickly.

The results were impressive. Apex preserved skin texture while removing distractions. This is a big one for me, and just one of the reasons I still use the original Retouch4me plugin in my workflow. So many other one-click retouching apps nuke the skin texture all together. With Apex, there was no plastic sheen, no AI weirdness, just clean, professional results. In a batch of 25 studio headshots, about 90% required little to no additional manual retouching beyond what Apex applied.

That’s a huge time-saver.

Breaking Down the Tools

Skin Retouching

Very natural and controlled. It keeps skin texture while removing blemishes and uneven tones. This is vital when clients expect a polished look but don’t want to look airbrushed.

Eyes & Teeth

Eye brightening and vein removal, paired with conservative teeth whitening, make a big impact without over-processing. Like with every retouching service or app it is really easy to overdo the eye and teeth whitening, I always apply a small amount which is Ideal for headshots where subtle polish matters.

Dodge & Burn

It’s subtle and automated, baked into the overall look. While not as precise as manual D&B, the contrast and shaping work well enough for most standard headshot needs. For me, this is where Retouch4Me products always outshine the competition. I can spend a chunk of time manually applying the dodge and burn to a portrait or I can get it 95% of the way there with one click. This one alone is worth the price of admission for me.

Clothes & Backdrop

Apex shines in the portrait world when it comes to getting rid of those pesky wrinkles or flaws in clothing easily. It also smooths wrinkles and neutralizes distracting background tones, helping you clean up studio or location shots quickly. If you have a large distraction like the edge of a lightbox, it struggles a bit, but for the most part I’m going to use generative fill in Photoshop for that sort of heavy lifting anyway.

Performance and Speed

Because Apex processes images in the cloud, it won’t tax your computer, even while batch-processing dozens of client images. It’s fast, even on a mid-range machine. Just know that if your internet connection lags, your processing time will too. Once you hit the process button, it can take a bit to return the final results. We have decent upload speed here at the studio and at times I did notice some slowdown. This seems like a reasonable tradeoff considering the amount of time saved per portrait process time though.

Cost: Pay-Per-Image, Pay-Per-Suite

Apex uses a credit system, with pricing starting at around $0.06 per image for high volumes. If you shoot hundreds of portraits weekly, this cost can add up. But compare that to the hourly rate you’d spend retouching manually, and Apex quickly pays for itself. Their credit system is in line with the price of the competition, but they don’t charge for each portion of the retouch. Some services charge a credit for dodge and burn, skin tone and distraction removal. With Apex, click start retouching and then dial in the look you want with the sliders on the panel.  

There’s also a standalone version available for those not working in Photoshop, which is a plus. For the purposes of this review, I only took a cursory look at the standalone version, and focused primarily on the plugin.

Apex vs. Traditional Workflow

My old portrait editing flow looked something like this:

• Clone/Heal pass
• Manual Dodge & Burn
• Eye enhancement
• Fabric wrinkles and backdrop cleanup

With Apex, that’s reduced to a one-click process with optional fine-tuning. It doesn’t replace precision editing for beauty or editorial work, but for headshots, corporate portraits, school photos, and online profile shoots? It nails it.

Where It Falls Short

• Internet Dependency: You can’t edit without a connection. This can be a problem during on-location work.
• Customization Limits: Sliders are great, but you can’t use brushes or apply masks within the app.
• No Layer Separation: This is a sticking point for me. The previous Retouch4me plugins exported each effect to its own layer. Apex does everything in one pass, which limits your ability to tweak individual edits after processing. As someone who likes to go back and finesse details layer by layer, I miss that flexibility.

That said, Apex does offer real-time previews, which helps. It’s a practical feature, but not a full substitute for layered control. Whether you need this functionality all depends on your workflow.

Still, for culling and editing dozens of headshots quickly, say, from a client proofing session, Apex is excellent for doing first-pass retouches that you can later refine in Photoshop.

Torture Test

While I can’t show the results from my torture test (the person I shot said absolutely not) I have to say that Apex was able to recover an image to a deliverable state that I would have considered a total loss. The setup was a single angled off camera Profoto strobe (not straight on) close to the subject with no softbox. I intentionally shot underexposed to accentuate the person’s facial wrinkles and smile lines. In Lightroom I brought the exposure to a reasonable level then loaded into Photoshop and sent it off to Retouch4Me’s servers. I have to say I was shocked and wish I could show you the results.

Workflow Examples From My Test Shoot

We shot this with standard clamshell lighting and intentionally wrinkled the backdrop to see how Retouch4Me Apex would handle the edit. 

The upload and edit workflow. 

Final uncropped image 

Testing environmental portraits and male portraits.  

Final Verdict: A Studio Workhorse

Retouch4me Apex isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. Instead, it’s laser-focused on solving the pain point of bulk portrait editing. And it succeeds.

If you’re a portrait or headshot photographer dealing with high volume, tight deadlines, and clients who expect clean, natural-looking results fast, Apex is a strong addition to your toolkit.

It won’t replace precision, layer-based artistry. But for the bread-and-butter of the industry, clean, consistent portrait editing, it gets you most of the way there with one click.

If they offered an option to toggle the edits onto their own layers so I could get my inner photoshop nerd satisfied, it would be a 10/10 for me.  

Rating: 9/10

Best for: Headshot photographers, portrait studios, school and corporate shooters, anyone managing large retouching queues.

If you would like to read my review of the original Retouch4ME Panel find it below. 

Retouch4Me, Ai portrait retouching magic