How to Humanize AI Photo — Step-by-Step Guide

How to make AI-generated photos look more human (and less uncanny)

AI image generators have gotten remarkably good in 2026. Midjourney v6, DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion XL, and Flux can produce images that look almost photographic. But "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Most AI-generated photos still have subtle tells that trained eyes (and specialized detectors) can spot immediately.

If you are using AI images for marketing, social media, or any professional context, here is exactly how to fix the most common issues.

The 6 dead giveaways of AI photos

1. Hands and fingers. This is the most famous AI artifact. Extra fingers, fused digits, impossibly long thumbs. Always zoom in on hands first. If they are wrong, you need to either regenerate the image with a different seed or fix them manually in Photoshop or GIMP.

2. Teeth that are too perfect. AI tends to generate teeth that look like a dental commercial. Real teeth have slight irregularities, mild discoloration, and natural shadow. If the teeth look like porcelain veneers, the viewer's subconscious registers something as "off."

3. Hyper-smooth skin. AI skin has a waxy, airbrushed quality. Real skin has pores, tiny imperfections, and varied texture. The fix: add a subtle noise or grain filter in post-processing. Even 2-3% noise makes a massive difference.

4. Perfect facial symmetry. No real human face is perfectly symmetrical. AI faces often are. In editing software, slightly adjust one eyebrow, or make one eye marginally narrower than the other. This subtle asymmetry triggers the viewer's brain to register the face as "real."

5. Background inconsistencies. Look at the edges where the subject meets the background. AI often creates soft blending artifacts, text that looks like gibberish, or objects that don't quite make physical sense (a chair with 5 legs, a window that leads nowhere).

6. Jewelry and accessories. Earrings that don't match, necklaces that clip through skin, glasses with impossible reflections. These small details are easy to miss but signal AI generation to careful observers.

The post-processing workflow

1. Generate multiple versions of your image and pick the one with the fewest artifacts.
2. Zoom to 200% and inspect hands, teeth, ears, and background text.
3. Fix obvious errors in Photoshop, Canva, or GIMP.
4. Add a subtle grain/noise filter (2-5%) to the entire image.
5. Apply a very slight color shift to break the AI's default color palette.

Looking for AI text humanization instead?

If you came here looking to humanize AI-generated text rather than photos, head to Humanize AI Pro. It structurally rewrites AI text to bypass detectors like Turnitin and GPTZero, which is an entirely different process from editing images.