Digital beauty treatments in After Effects and beyond

Digital beauty treatments and cosmetic fixes in post production often involve isolating skin with tracking and mattes for color correction and matching, skin smoothing, and blemish removal. Even skin matching isn't so easy, but there's some help along the way in basic and advanced tutorials on the wide variety of tools available.

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...read the rest at PVC in Cosmetic fixes, blemish removal, and skin retouching in post-production.

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If you're interested in this topic, there's a free webinar this week from Moviola, The Secret Art of Cosmetic Fixes Learning, to be held September 4, 2014 (details at link).

3-way Color Corrector in Premiere

Karl Soule shares tips on using the 3-way Color Corrector in Premiere -- how to affect just skin tone in an image, boost saturation for a green field of grass, and more. This is the 3rd in a series on the 3-Way CC from the Short and Suite show.

Skin Retouching in Colorista II with Stu Maschwitz

Red Giant posted the 5th tutorial in a series by Stu Maschwitz, Cosmetics: Skin Retouching with Magic Bullet Colorista II,

which "shows you how you can quickly and easily use Magic Bullet Colorista II for cosmetic skin retouching. You'll learn simple and effective techniques for subtly downplaying signs of age (such as wrinkles or skin blemishes), and giving pale skin a healthy color, without effecting other elements in your shot."


05 - Cosmetics: Skin Retouching with Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.


For more, see an earlier post "Correct" skin tones and others tagged skin.

Update: See also Quick Skin Tone tutorial in FCP:

Quick Skin Tone tutorial in FCP - Final Cut Pro from studio mountain on Vimeo.

Digital Anarchy returns with AE filter Beauty Box

Digital Anarchy returns with a new After Effects/NLE filter, Beauty Box (Mac/Win). Some commercials featuring older actresses suffer from a heavy hand on Median or Blur filters. This filter seems more precise, fast, and easy; see the video overview of Beauty Box for a quick peek.

Here's some detail:

"Beauty Box uses face detection to automatically identify skin tones and create a mask that limits the smoothing effect to just the skin areas. This automated process usually requires little or no input from the user and does not involve hand masking.

Just apply the filter, click auto-detect, set the amount of smoothing, and render. This is designed to speed up the workflow that is usually required for skin retouching. Effects artists and editors no longer have to manually create masks and retouch frame by frame.

The skin smoothing itself is also new technology. It keeps the important features of the face sharp while reducing or eliminating wrinkles and blemishes. By incorporating state-of-the-art face detection and smoothing algorithms, Beauty Box is designed to give actors a makeover in post-production."

New AE filters Camera Mapper and Mojo

Digieffects announced Camera Mapper, an After Effects filter developed in collaboration with Mark Christiansen that "allows you to simulate a 3D scene from 2D stills or footage. It allows you to isolate one or several objects in your footage, project these objects on a separate layer and pull that layer out of the background, creating the visual illusion of the object floating in front of the original footage."

Also, Red Giant announced Magic Bullet Mojo, a filter that acts like a magic button to give you a blockbuster-type film look "often use a subtle coloring effect to warm up actors’ skin tones while backgrounds and shadows get a cool blue treatment" (don't worry, there's a Warm slider to mix up the look). For background see the AEP post on a discussion of examples of Blockbuster Film Look and the Stu Maschwitz note.

Update: David Torno had comments on camera mapping (once championed by ex-ILMer Alex Lindsay for Electric Image) the AE-List, "The [Camera Mapper] plugin simplifies a method Andrew Kramer showed back in 2007... I wouldn't compare it to Photoshop vpe though. With vpe you create an actual connected 3d grid layout for the still image environment and panels are created and placed based on the grid.

The projection method allows the image to be projected onto any shape long as they fall within the projection bounds. They don't even have to be on the right plane. This can produce some interesting looks, where the background is warped by various solids. You still have to build the environment though.

Camera Projector would have been a better name. Since mapper implies that the image is stuck to the object. Obviously that is not the case as soon as you move any object in the scene."

Update 2: see VisualFXtuts.com for a Digieffects Aged Film & CameraMapper Review and Giveaway!

Blockbuster Film Look [updated]

Red Giant Software announced that Stu Maschwitz passed the audition and is the new Creative Director for Magic Bullet products. There's more in Got Me a Side Job at Prolost.

The payoff for the rest of us is cool tools and tutorials -- in the first one, Creating a Summer Blockbuster Film Look, Stu shows you how to get the Summer blockbuster look of flesh tones and complementary blue-teals as seen in Transformers 2, Terminator: Salvation, and The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.



Update: It's not bad being late to Stu's posts since the threads are a part of the action. One person asked about color grading a frame containing people of different ethnicities/skin tones. Stu referenced an old post on the subject Hue are you?, which points to PrepShootPost's Skin Color conclusion: "We all line up on the same line on a vectorscope, this line is called the 'Flesh Tone Line' or FTL and its on most vectorscopes." Presumably, if a happy medium can't be found, the shot might be send into roto/matte or CC secondary surgery.

Update 2: see also another AEP post, "Correct" skin tones, and Painting HD Cameras pt. 2 - Skin Tones from HD Cinema.

Update 3: Paul Del Vecchio posted a color correction tutorial on skin tones using Apple Color.

"Correct" skin tones

Prolost continues with concentrated reads, now with the profusely illustrated Save Our Skins:

"I've mentioned before that the current trend in film color correction is the relentless preservations of "correct" skin tones. I saw an interesting example of this recently that I thought I'd share. But first a little background.

There's no question that skin tones are important. Movies are about people and for people. Pleasing skin tones means pleasing-looking people, a cornerstone of the film industry to be sure. But as filmmaking sensibilities grew more and more informed by the capabilities of the DI, an evolution that got real traction, by my estimation, around 2002-2003 with films like Bad Boys II (Stefan Sonnenfeld, colorist) and Underworld (Jet Omoshebi, colorist), more "pushed" looks became commonplace. An aggressive color correction is more likely to render skin tones in an unflattering way, so a colorist's capability was judged in part by his ability to hold pleasing skin tones through severe corrections."

...continue reading at Prolost...

Update: HD Cinema has more on skin tones in Painting HD Cameras pt. 2 - Skin Tones.

Dove flies right & wins Grand Prix

NewTeeVee mentions that Dove’s “Evolution” Web Vid Wins Top Ad Award, a Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix. I still enjoy occasionally re-viewing this piece from Dove's "Campaign for Beauty;" it's a welcome relief from the old feed lot. NewTeeVee points to advice that even a Cow could learn to love:

"The good thing about Dove’s Grand Prix award, though, is that it’s likely to help more advertisers understand that consumers’ conversations around the brand help the brand. The more people mentioning your media online — consumer-fortified media, as Nielsen’s Pete Blackshaw calls it — the more traffic you get. Easy peasy."

ReelPop posted YouTube links on runners up at Cannes, but you can go directly to the showcase of winning clips and other awards categories at Cannes Lions.

Dove on Flippant News and AdJab

Flippant News, a blog on editing and movie making, and AdJab, a Weblogs Inc. Network blog on the ad industry, both covered the great short on retouching in ads done by Dove.