Beauty retouching

[Thomas Singh]

I came across this Scratch tutorial about beauty retouching. In still photography, retouchers often tend to use cloning, healing and B/D techniques. What is your approach to beauty work?

 

[cameronrad]

We also have some quick n' dirty tricks that might work for video like a technique called Band Pass or Inverted High Pass.  It's a variation of a common technique known as Frequency Separation. I imagine if it's keyed in for skin tones it might work. 

 

Explanation for the techy: http://sean-blog.twicebakedphoto.com/2010/08/vf-tools-of-trade.html\

More simple breakdown: http://www.derek-johnston.co.uk/blog/2014/2/tutorial-inverted-high-pass

Frequency Separation: https://fstoppers.com/post-production/ultimate-guide-frequency-separation-technique-8699

Though nobody likes to admit it. when we are in a pinch we sometimes use frequency separation and this plugin on the low frequency layer. http://www.imagenomic.com/pt.aspx Sometimes it's just much faster to use the plugin to fix patchiness than manually cloning. Also adjusting the luminance of the red vs. yellow can help smooth patchiness. Normally you'll have to lighten reds, darken yellows.

 

 

Edited December 1, 2016 by cameronrad

[Andreas Brueckl]

Thanks for posting Thomas.
I made this tutorial almost 5 years ago.
For sure there is new cool stuff in Scratch now that I'd use.

I am actually looking forward to use Baselight 5.0 with the retouching, grid warper and frequency separation features.

 

[Julien Chichignoud]

I don't do much Beauty touch ups, and most of what I do is pretty quick turnaround, so I just use the quickest tricks, personally.

Lowering the "Midtone Detail" option in Resolve is great for that (which is based on frequency separation).

And I use the Hue vs Hue curve when skin colour is inconsistent (bad make-up, etc...)

[Margus Voll]

I just did this lingerie xmas spot where the model was not as smooth as you see it in final results.

Could i have gone in more detail sure but would needed more powerful machine also as 4k delivery is asked in the end. From shot to shot you can gather the actual skin under the correction and probably feel what was going on. Will not share originals here.

Key trick was parallel nodes with masking + heavy blur with heavy feather and some grain on top of it to kill plastic feeling.
Could id be done in more detail? Sure but we had time and budget that limited it a bit.
 

 

[Nicolas Hanson]

On 1.12.2016 at 3:52 PM, cameronrad said:

 It's a variation of a common technique known as Frequency Separation

Hi Cameron, can you please explain what the frequency separation is all about?

[Abby Bader]

If the model got light skin you would like to hide the blue / magenta beneath the surface, especially around the eyes. Just like girls do in real life to make the skin look more healthy and to make the eyes pop. Adding some warmth to knock out those colors will often result in some more "life" to the model even if you want to keep the overall skin tones natural. 

Edited December 22, 2016 by Abby Bader

[Yoav Raz]

There is another grate tutorial by Nicholas Recagno demonstrating Frequency Separation on Mistika.

 

[Thomas Singh]

Thank you for your great insight!

[Nicolas Hanson]

What technique do you prefer for skin smoothing? I will leave wrinkles and pimples to the Flame guys but since I got better keyer/tracker I want to do the first pass getting rid of the skin pores around the nose area.

Edited March 30, 2017 by Nicolas Hanson

[Marc Wielage]

Often, I think you have to track different parts of the face, treating (say) the forehead separately from the area under the eyes, and the neck separately from the face. I find SNR in Resolve can be helpful (with a qualified key), and sometimes negative midtone detail. It depends on the nature of the original material.

[Abby Bader]

 

On 30.3.2017 at 11:29 PM, Nicolas Hanson said:

What technique do you prefer for skin smoothing?

Tonal skin rendering is controlled by how we blend the three channels, so you should treat them seperately if you want fine control. The blue channel represents detail, and red tends to have smoother tones than green. You can use this insight to adjust the values to your liking. You could also blur different channels.

[Emily Haine]

Reducing midtone details is widely used on beauty spots and is a really great way of smoothing skin.

I'm generally not happy with package tools, but I have to say that I'm impressed with the new face track tool in DR when it comes to mapping lips, eyes and cheeks. The white inside the eyes could be difficult to highlight with traditional tracking but this tool analyze pretty complicated compositions and it has helped me many times.

[Anton Meleshkevich]

I made a frequency separation tree in Davinci.

Here is a .drx with the node tree (and some how-to-use pics)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lp2FQFX4NaPFv9NHtD-dOwLdqzbVmcxZ

- Select Skintone on MASK node (mask is inverted)

- Adjust Blur on DETAIL node to keep detail (More blur to keep more high freq detail)

- Adjust Blur or MD (works better than Blur) on LOW node to adjust low freq.

 

Edited November 21, 2017 by Anton Meleshkevich

[Ira Morris]

You can track the clone stamp in Fusion. I use it all the time to remove pimples and wrinkles. You can apply it to a Bspline and clone over the wrinkles with whatever shape you make it into (Line, circle, etc.). You can key frame the shape to move around objects like a foot if you are removing tape off the floor for instance. It also changes over lighting conditions so if you have arranged your selection correctly it will change with the shadowing or movement. All the tools are in the free version as well and dynamically links to Davinci!  No dancing skin or frame by frame mess. Took me a while to figure it out since there isn't any information online about it (that I can find - and I was new to Fusion at the time) but has tripled my speed with motion-retouching. 

[Amada Daro]

@Ira Morris, I'm fan of your fashion/beauty work! Can you share some of your beauty grading tips? 

[Ira Morris]

@Amada Daro What exactly are you a fan of? Just listing tips doesn't seem reasonable. What exactly caught your eye? 

[Aaron Rosapepe]

On 1/11/2018 at 12:26 PM, Ira Morris said:

You can track the clone stamp in Fusion. I use it all the time to remove pimples and wrinkles. You can apply it to a Bspline and clone over the wrinkles with whatever shape you make it into (Line, circle, etc.). You can key frame the shape to move around objects like a foot if you are removing tape off the floor for instance. It also changes over lighting conditions so if you have arranged your selection correctly it will change with the shadowing or movement. All the tools are in the free version as well and dynamically links to Davinci!  No dancing skin or frame by frame mess. Took me a while to figure it out since there isn't any information online about it (that I can find - and I was new to Fusion at the time) but has tripled my speed with motion-retouching. 

Hi Ira,

I would love to learn more about this technique. As it will be my first time diving into Fusion, do you have any tutorial links that you would suggest? 

 

[Aaron Rosapepe]

Just watched a couple "getting started" videos for Fusion followed by this basic cloning video. Did a quick test removing a blemish on a subject and very impressed with the results. Looking forward to exploring this more!

 

Edited January 15, 2018 by Aaron Rosapepe

[Abby Bader]

You could stack a couple of layers, create a mask around the blemish and ofset the first layer. That's a quick fix that works on some shots inside your color corrector. 

[Dylan R. Hopkin]

In Resolve just us Node Sizing / Power Windows / Tracker to attchieve what Abby suggested. Use it all the time to remove stuff. Spots, mics / booms, rig, dead pixels (before the dead pixel tool was available in R14). But a proper trackable paint tool would have been great to have too. Maybe that will surface in R15?

[Margus Voll]

I would say combination of things mentioned here would work in all scenarios. 

 

 

[Aaron Rosapepe]

Anyone have experience with the mocha pro work flow? I've watched a few videos now on blemish removal and the match light feature seems very cool. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdIbciXqgic

 

[Nicolas Hanson]

Mocha Pro is a standalone app but it also comes bundled with After Effects. A typical workflow is to generate the tracking data inside Mocha but to do the final composite elsewhere. It's definitely capable of handle complex skin situations.

[Bruno Mansi]

Mocha Pro is now also available as an Avid or OFX plugin, which saves having to export your video every time you want to planar track something. It's also included as part of the tool-set in the latest Boris Continuum suite of plugins, although I think it might be missing the remove module in this case.

It's always been my go-to application when I have a difficult track to do. It's particularly good with object removal/replacement where there's perspective changes or obstructions that tend to throw off point trackers