Lightricks Review: Facetune, Photoleap & Videoleap

Aimed at professional marketers and casual content creators alike, each app has fun features and integrated AI tools.

Let’s look at how these apps deliver creative options for photo and video editing tasks.

What is Lightricks?

The photo and video editing app market often feels oversaturated, but the evolution of AI-powered tools provides plenty of scope for innovation.

Lighticks is capitalizing on this emerging space with its selection of AI-rich apps—Facetune, Photoleap, and Videoleap.

Blending traditional editing tools with fun AI edits, the apps are ideal for beginners looking to share entertaining media with friends and family.

There’s also a good selection of features catering to pros who want to retouch images and create polished videos for content marketing.

User Interface

The Lightricks apps each present users with a bespoke user interface tailored to their specific tools and features.

They are consistently intuitive and neatly arranged, making navigation and editing images and videos effortless.

Facetune

Facetune’s neat user interface keeps with the app’s core appeal for fashion and marketing brands.

Launch the Facetune app and the interface is presented on a clean white backdrop. Essential tools are listed as thumbnails at the top of the screen.

You can select from features such as Enhance, Makeup, and Reshape or tap Start Retouching to begin editing a specific photo.

In addition to a section for popular features, the app includes a basic menu at the bottom of the interface, which consists of an Import option, AI fun category, and saved projects.

Photoleap

Photoleap and Videoleap both use vibrant thumbnails as part of their navigation.

In contrast to Facetune’s neat and minimalist UI, the Photoleap and Videoleap apps opt for a more vibrant aesthetic with a black backdrop.

The icons at the top of the interface allow users to access Photoleap’s main options, such as Edit Photo, Generate, Avatars, and Animate.

AI Avatar Packs and AI Filters follow New and Trending tools, all presented with attractive images that clearly indicate their functions.

Videoleap

Videoleap utilizes the same visual style and lists various tools and features in rows of icons and thumbnails, with the core AI Editing tools listed beneath with animated thumbnails.

Commonly used tools such as Auto Edit, Templates, Merge, Speed, and Filters are listed across the top, followed by popular AI Editing features.

Videoleap also features user-specific and Trending templates that can be viewed and used, similar to Capcut’s user-generated content.

Several rows of categorized templates based on popular content creation topics, including Food, Fire, Fashion, and Beauty, are also listed.

The user interface and experience are uniformly excellent across the Lightricks suite, and all icons are easy to read on smaller smartphones.

Help prompts, popup instructions, and excellent AI prompts for customizing templates assist users in navigating between tools.

Overall, each app is straightforward, and Lightricks has organized its various tools to encourage a logical workflow.

Photo Editing Features

The Lightricks apps include extensive photo editing tools, which are spread across the Facetune and Photoleap apps for professionals and casual users.

Facetune

Facetune features a large selection of core photo editing tools and features.

Facetune is geared toward editing portraits and group photos. It has several retouching tools to remove blemishes and other attributes.

Standard tools such as Crop, Whiten, Smooth, Tones, and Red Eye work well, with pinch-and-zoom to hone in on finer details.

Using the Reshape tool allows for further refinement of faces to alter facial features and body shapes.

Facetune also offers tools to enhance the overall aesthetic of portraits, including the Lighting tool, which creates various moods like Golden Hour and Studio.

Local adjustments are made by swiping over the image in the relevant area and then adjusting the intensity by using the slider control.

Photoleap

Photoleap’s AI-powered features are complemented by a selection of core image editing tools.

While Photoleap’s selling point is its various AI tools, it does include a series of traditional photo editing tools.

The Adjust menu lets you fine-tune brightness, hue, saturation, sharpness, contrast, and exposure settings, allowing for a high level of control over your image’s tone and feel.

You can also perform basic cropping and introduce additional images to your project as layers, blending multiple effects into one image.

Video Editing Features

Videoleap

Videoleap uses a timeline editing structure with a menu located at the bottom of the screen for easy navigation.

The video editing features available through Videoleap will be intuitive to anyone familiar with comparable smartphone video editing apps.

Once you’ve created a new project, the video clip is presented in a preview window with the timeline beneath, followed by the editing tools.

This includes categories for Text and Audio, adjustment parameters, and a Mixer tool for loading additional media into the project.

Videoleap offers all the standard tools video editors demand, from transform and clip speed adjustments to reversing and freezing frames.

The clips can also be styled with filters, while the Animation tool can be used to add keyframes for more complex projects.

It’s a commendably comprehensive editor with a wide selection of effects, from film grain and pixelation to patterns and kaleidoscopes.

AI-Based Photo Editing Features

Facetune and Photoleap’s suite of tools complement the standard editing features with an extensive selection of AI-powered features.

While both are geared toward editing photos of people, Facetune emphasizes fashion and portraits over Photoleaps’ novelty and fun factor.

Facetune

Fashion-conscious users can try out new clothing styles using Facetune’s AI-powered tools.

Facetune offers a selection of AI tools for modifying facial features, ranging from changing the overall look to experimenting with facial hair.

Each tool is straightforward to use. You simply tap on the desired effect and wait for the app to process the results.

Once the process is complete, further refinements can be made, such as adding makeup to images and changing their color and opacity.

Beards, eyebrows, and hairstyles can also be added to faces, with accurate results and a decent selection of styles to play with.

Facetune also includes AI clothing tools that allow users to swap out shirts, trousers, and other items depending on the edited photo.

As a finishing touch, tools exist to alter an image’s backdrop and introduce various skies to replace the existing background.

Photoleap

There’s an impressive selection of fun and easy-to-use AI tools to alter images through Photoleap.

While Facetune’s AI tools are rather limited, Photoleap’s AI features offer a far more extensive selection and impressive creative potential.

Like Facetune, there’s a good selection of portrait-centric tools, albeit with a more laid-back and entertaining approach to content creation.

The various AI Filters, such as Fantasy Portraits, Hunkify, AI Headshots, and AI Costume, are all packed with imaginative templates.

Users can also use the Custom feature to type in their prompts for the artificial intelligence system to use when generating images.

Likewise, Photoleap’s AI-generated images cover various backgrounds, further improving its longevity.

Located in the AI Scenes tab, these range from cities and seasons to fictional settings and visual styles such as comics and neo-noir.

Likewise, the AI Avatars are comprehensively categorized, with many packs available in combination with Photoleap’s other AI tools.

In another echo of the popular TikTok app Capcut, Photoleap also encourages active participation in user-generated content.

The brand has active communities on Discord, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where users share their creations and provide useful tutorials and guides.

AI-Based Video Editing Features

Like Photoleap, Videoleap’s primary selling point is its selection of AI-integrated tools, which is just as impressive as its photography counterpart.

These tools offer a range of functions that help amateur content creators with processes like color correction and more, all accessible through voice prompts.

For more aesthetically striking videos, Videoleap’s tools include impressive AI effects that swap out clothing from videos and alter faces and styles.

There’s an AI Panorama tool for seamless scrolling videos and Infinite and Horror Zoom tools for endlessly expanding footage.

Scene Swap does what you’d expect, while advanced users can access the Prompt feature for more nuanced customized videos.

If the selection seems overwhelming, Videoleap includes sample works tailored to the user and trending templates for preview and use.

These allow you to import your clips and auto-edit them in the app for a faster workflow and overview of the features.

Products

Facetune

Facetune gives you a wide range of editing tools to easily enhance portrait photos and try out different transformations.

With its AI features, you can apply makeup, test new hairstyles, and touch up images to smooth out blemishes and other imperfections.

You can also generate unique avatars, change the backgrounds and skies, and create distinct selfies for social media pages.

Videoleap

An all-in-one editing suite for video content creators, Videoleap features a feed combined with extensive templates and tools.

Its high-end editing tools are easy to use and geared toward beginners, while the AI features include dozens of creative templates.

Videoleap also has a strong user community and shareable templates that encourage active participation from its users.

Photoleap

Aimed at digital content creators who want AI tools to enhance their productions, Photoleap blends traditional image editing with special effects.

More advanced users can use layering and blending tools for marketing and other content creation.

Overall Performance

With so many different tools available through the various apps, performance will inevitably vary depending on the features you use.

As you’d expect, the photo editing features are more responsive, with the core tools processing results promptly.

On the other hand, some of the AI-based edits can take time to work through, which can occasionally be frustrating when the end result isn’t up to scratch.

Fortunately, this doesn’t happen frequently and becomes less of an issue once you become accustomed to using appropriate source images and videos.

Occasional connection issues also arose during testing but were infrequent enough not to mar the overall performance and fun user experience.

How I Tested Lightricks

Testing the Lightricks app on an Android smartphone

For this review, I tested all three apps on an Android smartphone, with a combination of images and videos from my device or created within the apps.

Portrait images were used to test Facetune’s skin and hair features and AI-powered clothing and background features.

A selection of images was used to test the various AI-powered background and costume tools, with multiple compositions to assess the results.

When testing Videoleap’s editing tools and AI features, I used a selection of videos, from family clips to landscape shots.

Alternatives to Lightricks

Content creators are spoiled for choice in the photo and video editing app market, with an extensive selection of tools.

Professionals looking for comprehensive photo and video editing can respectively opt for established apps such as Adobe Lightroom or CyberLink’s PowerDirector apps.

For photo retouching, apps such as Pixlr and Evoto allow impressive portrait editing using artificial intelligence features.

AI Video Editor delivers some features that are available in Videoleap, while TikTok content creators typically use Capcut for their editing processes.

Value for Money

The Lightricks selection of apps includes free versions, although unlocking all of the features requires an annual subscription.

Although they’re relatively expensive compared to alternatives, they allow access to an impressive selection of AI tools not found on many other apps.

While casual users might find the pricing too high, content creators on monetized platforms will get plenty of unique assets for their social media presence.

The apps also offer plenty of longevity in terms of fun AI features thanks to the extensive selection of templates and customization tools.

Lightricks Review | Conclusion

Lightricks has delivered an impressive trio of photo and video editing apps that appeal to a broad user base.

While professional photographers aren’t likely to be converted from Adobe Lightroom, other content creators are well served.

Likewise, the sheer volume of fun and engaging AI tools offers endless scope for creative results that bring a new dimension to photos and videos.

While the subscription pricing might be a drawback, especially if you’re interested in all three apps, Lightricks’ thorough approach to feature design makes it a compelling choice for creators.

Highly Recommended

Lightricks Mobile Apps

Intuitive, fun and powerful suite of tools with impressive AI-based features.

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