Photo Face Swap for Stills, Done Properly
Upload one face and one picture. The engine rebuilds the face region at the size you sent it, so a photo face swap comes back sharp enough to print rather than sharp enough to post.
A photo face swap is the simplest job this engine does. One still image, one face region, one pass. There is no motion to track, no flicker between frames, and no frame count multiplying the bill, which is why a single picture costs 10 credits and comes back in seconds rather than minutes. If you are learning what the tool can do, stills are where you learn it: cheap attempts, fast feedback, and a result you can judge at full size.
Stills are unforgiving in a different way. Nobody pauses a video to inspect a hairline, but everybody zooms into a photograph. So the things that decide a photo face swap are the boring photographic ones: how many pixels the face actually occupies, whether the file has been re-saved as a JPEG four times, and whether the colour profile agrees between your two uploads. Get those three right and the model has very little left to get wrong.
Nothing is preloaded here. There are no preset faces, no thumbnails of real people, and no library of anybody at all. You upload the source face as an image, you upload the target picture, and the photo face swap happens between the two files you chose. That keeps the output yours and the responsibility yours, which is the difference between a tool and a directory of people to impersonate.
What the Photo Face Swap Actually Gives You
Full resolution output
A photo face swap returns the target at the dimensions you sent it, up to the 10MB image ceiling. The swapped region is rebuilt pixel by pixel rather than pasted over, and the output image scale control enlarges the finished file when you need print size. Nothing is cropped, downsampled or watermarked on any plan.
JPEG, PNG and WebP all accepted
Feed it any of the three still formats and the pipeline decodes them the same way. PNG keeps the edge detail that heavy JPEG compression eats, WebP saves bandwidth, and JPEG is fine when it came out of a camera once rather than out of six group chats. A photo face swap treats all three identically.
Output quality you set yourself
The advanced panel exposes output image quality and output image scale as real numbers. Raise the quality when a photo face swap is heading for a large print, drop it when you want a small file for a thumbnail, and the encoder respects what you set instead of guessing.
One face out of a crowd
Selector mode with a reference position pins a group photo face swap to a single face, so a birthday table of nine people gets one changed head and eight untouched ones. Selector order and reference distance narrow the match further when two people stand shoulder to shoulder.
Private storage, nothing published
Uploads go to presigned private storage scoped to your account, and every photo face swap lands in your job history where you can download it. No result is shown to other users, promoted anywhere, or fed back into training the model.
How to Run a Photo Face Swap in 3 Steps
Pick the source face
The source must be an image: JPEG, PNG or WebP, under 10MB. Choose the shot where the face is largest and sharpest, front on, with both eyes clear. This one file sets the ceiling on how good the finished picture can look.
Add the target picture
Upload the photograph you want that face placed into. The target decides pose, lighting, framing and output dimensions, so a photo face swap inherits every photographic decision baked into that file.
Swap, inspect, download
A photo face swap costs 10 credits and normally comes back in seconds. Open the result at full size, check the hairline and the eyes, then download the file. There is no watermark and no export tier.
Free accounts get 10 welcome credits once and 10 more every day, which is exactly one image swap per day at no cost. A video costs 30 credits, so stills stretch a free balance much further.
Where a Photo Face Swap Earns Its Keep
Each of these starts with two pictures you have the right to use, and each is a job a still does better than any clip.
Print and framing
Canvas, poster and album work needs pixels, not motion. Push output image scale up, switch frame enhance on, and a photo face swap will hold together at A3 without the swapped region going soft.
The group shot somebody missed
Somebody was at the dinner and not in the photograph, or blinked in the one frame that otherwise worked. Reference mode picks the one face to replace and leaves the other eight untouched.
Thumbnails, covers and posters
Creators need a face in a pose no stock library carries. Build the composition once, swap the face into it, and skip the reshoot. A still also costs a third of what the video route does.
Pitch and production stills
Casting mockups, lookbooks and pitch decks need one convincing frame rather than a whole sequence. A photo face swap answers the question in seconds and reads far more honestly than a mood board.
Your own face, retaken
The commonest use of all: moving your own better expression out of one shot and into another, or into the group picture where you closed your eyes.
Getting a Clean Photo Face Swap from a Still
Face size in the frame beats megapixels
The number that decides a photo face swap is not the megapixel count of the file, it is how many pixels wide the face sits inside that file. A face 500 pixels across in a modest 2000 pixel photograph gives the model far more to work with than a face 150 pixels across in a 6000 pixel landscape. Crop tighter when you shoot the source, or pick the frame where the head fills more of the picture, and you will skip most of the troubleshooting below.
This cuts both ways. A huge source against a small target wastes the extra detail, because the swapped region is scaled down to fit the face it replaces and everything past that is thrown away. When the target itself is the weak link, face enhance rebuilds texture inside the swapped region and frame enhance lifts the whole image around it. Neither toggle costs extra credits, and both earn their processing time on a photo face swap built from an old picture.
Format and compression: when PNG is worth it
JPEG discards high frequency detail to save space, and it discards it hardest exactly where a photo face swap needs it most: eyelashes, the hairline, the wet edge of the lips. One save straight out of a camera is invisible. A picture that has been screenshotted, re-saved and forwarded through three apps arrives with blocky artefacts baked into the skin, and the model reproduces those blocks faithfully in the output because it cannot tell them apart from real texture.
PNG is worth the bigger file whenever the picture has already been edited once, and whenever it is heading for print. WebP sits in between and uploads faster. Do not strip metadata on purpose: EXIF and the embedded colour profile travel with your upload, and a mismatch between a Display P3 source and an sRGB target is the usual reason a swapped face reads slightly warmer or cooler than the neck underneath it. Convert both files to one profile first.
Group photos: pinning the swap with reference mode
By default the detector finds every face in the picture, which is wrong for a group photo face swap where you want one person changed and the rest left alone. Switch selector mode from many to reference, then set the reference position to the face you actually mean. Positions follow the detector order, so raise or lower that number until the preview changes the right head. This is the most useful control on the page and almost nobody opens it.
When two people stand shoulder to shoulder, reference distance decides how tolerant the match is: tighten it and the swap stops wandering onto the neighbour. If the detector misses a face at the edge of a wide group shot, lower the detector score a little or raise the detector size so smaller faces still register. Change one parameter per attempt. A photo face swap costs 10 credits, so blind guessing is cheap, but it is slow.
Check These Six Things First
Almost every disappointing result traces back to the input rather than the engine. FaceFusion on RunPod GPUs behaves the same way on every job, so when one photo face swap comes back looking photographic and the next looks pasted on, the difference arrived with the files.
Read this list before you spend credits on a photo face swap. It takes fifteen seconds and heads off the three or four wasted attempts most people burn learning these same lessons in the expensive order.
- Face is several hundred pixels wide inside the source image
- Source and target head angles roughly agree
- Neither file has been re-compressed as a JPEG many times
- Both images carry the same colour profile
- Target is under 10MB as JPEG, PNG or WebP
- You hold the rights to both pictures and consent for the face
What You May Not Make Here
There is no roster of real people on this page and there never will be. You supply the source face, so you are the one answerable for whose face it is. Sexual content using a real person's likeness without their consent is prohibited outright, and so is output built to pass as a genuine unedited photograph of something that never happened. On a stills page that second rule bites hardest, because a photo face swap offered up as evidence travels further than any clip.
Parody, commentary, fan work, pitch and production material and your own likeness are all fair game, and labelling edited media as edited costs you nothing. Three lines are absolute: never a swap onto a private individual who did not ask for it, never one involving a minor, and never one onto an identity document. Likeness and publicity rights, non consensual intimate imagery statutes and synthetic media election rules all carry real penalties now. Abusive accounts lose access, and we honour takedown requests from the people depicted.
Photo Face Swap FAQ
Is the photo face swap free?
Every account gets 10 welcome credits once and 10 more every day. An image costs 10 credits, so that daily grant is exactly one free image swap per day, with no watermark. A video costs 30 credits, which is why video work needs a paid plan.
Is the output print ready?
Yes, within the resolution you gave it. The result keeps the target dimensions, output image scale enlarges it further, and frame enhance lifts the detail. A photo face swap cannot invent pixels the target never had, so a 900 pixel picture will not become a poster. Start from the largest original.
What happens in a photo with several faces?
By default the model swaps every face it detects. To change one person, set selector mode to reference and give the reference position of the face you want, then adjust reference distance if a neighbour gets caught. Everyone else in the group photo comes back untouched.
Which formats and file sizes work?
JPEG, PNG and WebP for stills, up to 10MB. The source face must be an image. The target can be an image, or a video up to 100MB for the video route instead. Anything outside those formats is rejected before it costs you a credit.
How long does it take?
Seconds for a still, not minutes. A photo face swap runs one detection and blending pass, so nothing multiplies by frame count. Face enhance and frame enhance add processing time but never extra credits. Only video jobs take one to five minutes.
Why does my result look soft or blocky?
In order of likelihood: the face was too small in the source, the target had been re-saved as a JPEG too many times, output image quality was low, or the two files carry different colour profiles. Work down that list one change at a time.
Do you keep my pictures?
Uploads go to presigned private storage that only your account can write to, and results stay in your job history to download. Nothing from a photo face swap is published, shown to other users, or used as training data.
Other Face Swap Tools
The same engine behind this photo face swap, pointed at a different kind of source material.
Start a Photo Face Swap
Upload a face and a picture. Today's free credits cover one photo face swap at full resolution, with no watermark on the file.
Swap a Face Now