Overview

Faces and skin are the areas guests notice first when they look for themselves on the wall. PMWall blends every tile toward your main photo's colors so the mosaic reads clearly as a portrait — but push it too far in the wrong place, and faces can start to look tinted or unnatural. This article covers how to get that balance right.

How Face & Skin Blending Works

PMWall treats Skin and Face as their own zones, separate from Background and Body & Clothing. Each zone has two controls:

• Blend mode — how the tint is applied
• Tint % — how strongly it's applied

By default:

Zone	Blend mode	Tint
Background	Soft light	10%
Body & clothing	Soft light	45%
Skin	Overlay	65%
Face	Overlay	85%

Notice the pattern: tint strength increases from Background up to Face. This is intentional, not just a default someone picked at random — it's what makes the mosaic look natural rather than flat.

Why Background Matters Too

It's tempting to think of Skin and Face tinting in isolation, but they only look "right" in contrast to a much lighter touch on the Background. Here's why:

• Background stays subtle (10%) so guest photos still look like distinct, recognizable pictures of people — not just a wash of portrait color. This is what keeps individual tiles feeling like real photos when guests look for themselves up close.
• Skin and Face blend much more strongly (65% and 85%) so that, from a distance, faces are what visually "pull together" into the portrait. Faces carry most of the visual weight in any picture, so they need the most blending to make the illusion work.

If you flatten this gradient — for example, pushing Background tint up close to Face tint — the mosaic can start to lose its "made of individual photos" charm. Everything blends together too evenly, and it stops reading as a mosaic of people and starts reading as a single tinted image.

Conversely, if Background tint is raised while Skin/Face stay low, you get the opposite problem: the wall looks like a random patchwork of photos with a colored background, and the portrait doesn't emerge clearly at all.

The natural-looking result comes from keeping that gap between Background and Face — a light touch behind guests, and a much stronger blend on the faces themselves.

Choosing a Blend Mode

You have three options for Skin and Face, same as every other zone:

• Soft light — a gentle shift toward the portrait's tones
• Overlay — nearly identical to Soft light, just slightly more contrast (this is the default for both Skin and Face)
• Multiply — a much stronger effect that darkens the tile and can tint even bright, pale skin tones

Important: Soft light and Overlay cannot change pure white or black areas of a photo. If a guest's photo has a very bright, overexposed face, neither mode will visibly tint it. Multiply is the only mode strong enough to affect those bright areas — but it also darkens the tile overall, so use it carefully on faces specifically, as it can look heavy-handed at high tint values.

Adjusting the Tint

Raising Skin or Face tint moves that zone's mid-tones further toward your main photo's colors. A few guidelines:

• If faces look too "tinted" or unnatural: lower the Face tint % before switching blend modes. A smaller adjustment in tint usually looks more natural than changing the blend mode.
• If faces don't seem to be blending at all: check whether the source photos are overexposed or very bright — this is the case Soft light/Overlay can't handle, and switching to Multiply (at a moderate tint) will help.
• If skin looks fine but faces look off: remember these are two independent zones. You can leave Skin at its default and adjust only Face, or vice versa.

The Overall Tint Strength Dial

There's also a global Overall tint strength setting (default 70%) that acts as a master multiplier on every zone's tint at once — including Skin and Face. If faces and skin both look over- or under-blended together, it's often faster to adjust this one dial rather than Skin and Face individually.

• 0% turns off all zone tinting, regardless of individual zone settings
• 100% uses each zone's tint slider exactly as set

How This Relates to Portrait Show-Through

Skin and Face tinting are fine-tuning tools, not the main lever. Portrait show-through (the global setting that fades every tile toward the main image) is what does most of the work in making the wall read as a portrait — even at their defaults, Skin and Face tinting are gentler than Portrait show-through set to just 50%.

If faces still don't look like they're blending into the portrait after adjusting Skin/Face tint, check Portrait show-through first — that's usually the bigger lever to pull.

Quick Reference

Symptom	Try this
Faces look unnaturally colored/tinted	Lower Face tint %
Bright/pale faces aren't picking up any tint	Switch Face blend mode to Multiply
Faces and skin both look off together	Adjust Overall tint strength instead
Wall doesn't read as the portrait at all	Check Portrait show-through, not Skin/Face settings
Mosaic looks like one flat tinted image, not individual photos	Lower Background tint — it's likely too close to Skin/Face tint
Portrait doesn't emerge even though faces look tinted	Raise Background tint slightly, or double check it isn't set too high relative to Face

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