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Professional Video Retouching (hair, skin, etc)
Does anyone have professional tips or techniques for retouching hair flyaways and skin blemishes in After Effects? I can think of several ways to do this, but I was wondering if anyone had real production experience in working with this type of project? Like say you have a beauty product commercial, and the client wants the model’s hair retouched to remove strands that blow in front of their face or fly off and look too messy. Here are some techniques I would use to approach it (based on whatever assessment of the footage the client provides)… but I’m curious to hear other’s thoughts.
– Use a combination of roto masks and track mattes to isolate the strands of hair, then on a copy of the footage, offset the transform or time to find a place where that area was clean, and use the track matte on that copy of the footage over the original.
– Using the above masks and matte, blur a copy of the footage and add back grain to match the original.
These techniques may not work if the area being covered has too much detail.
– On a straight hair or smaller areas, the “CC Simple Wire Removal” filter may work, hand tracking the two control points.
– Clone stamp and vector paint may work, though I haven’t used these tools all that much to know their limitations or positives and negatives.
Does anyone have thoughts as to the best way to first approach this type of shot? I realize it’s hard without seeing a piece of footage, but I do know there are general first approaches to certain techniques. I would love to hear people’s thoughts who have done this in actual production scenarios.
Thanks.
-Robert
Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D -
23 Replies
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I’d guess that a beauty product shoot would have a small army of make-up artists to do all that so one wouldn’t have to worry about it in post.
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Thank you for that extremely unhelpful and obviously inexperienced response, Tero. Anyone who has worked for a commercial house would know that no matter how good the makeup artists are, and how great the DP is, the agency almost always wants some form of touchup done to a beauty shot. And hair flyaways are extremely common on shoots where a fan is blowing on the model to give added movement and dynamic to the shot. This has NOTHING to do with the quality of the shoot. This is a question about technique in post. I’m amazed someone would even respond with such a blatantly naive comment such as “one wouldn’t have to worry about it in post”. Unless you were being sarcastic, in which case the response is simply irrelevant.
Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D -
Thanks for giving me the Matlannon Photoshop tutorial on smoothing skin. Unfortunately, I am looking for After Effects techniques, hence why I posted in the After Effects Forum. I guess I should have been more specific and redundant in my lengthy explanation. But I am highly experienced with Photoshop retouching beauty photos. But anyone who has worked in a commercial house will know that retouching video is much different, and there are different techniques that apply.
Your second link was for a very old Andrew Kramer tutorial that uses remove grain and a track matte… similar to what I mentioned in my original post. I wish you would have given a more wordy response, because it appears to me as if you did a quick Google search and don’t really have much real-world experience in retouching video. These aren’t really helpful to what I was asking for. Andrew’s is a very basic technique for smoothing skin, and most commercials do not want a completely smooth plastic looking skin. They want beauty… bringing out certain features, and specific other things removed… like hair flyaways. How about we focus on techniques for hair flyaways to keep this a bit simpler?
Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D -
My friend makes plugins for FCP that were recently used extensively on “E! Entertainment’s Excellence on the Red Carpet series”. Boris has a skin plugin too. To automate hair flyaway removal you can key with AE’s pixel tracker to track the hair start/end points and then simply paste the keyframes into the start/end cc or bcc wire removal effect. Wire/hair its all the same to CC!
Electronic Makeup Artist
https://straylight.tv/pluginz/Boris skin plugin
https://www.borisfx.com/avid/bccavx_DS/https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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Thanks, Chris… but the FCP plugins don’t seem to help me with After Effects. Besides, I didn’t see much there that can’t be done in AE with the native filters… same with the Boris FX. I appreciate your suggestion about using CC Wire Removal, but I already mentioned that in my original post. And as I mentioned, it only works with straight hairs, or short segments. And have you ever tried to track the end of a flyaway hair? Not something AE’s native tracker can handle too well. Plus, pasting keyframes is a bit clunky these days. Using nulls and layer linking is much more efficient, in my opinion.
Anyone with actual recent production experience doing this type of work in After Effects?
Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D -
You did know the wire plugin can bend, right? And using multiple layers is sometimes necessary, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and clone stamp, heck you should read about the roto nightmares on Pirates of the Caribean.
here’s a skin plugin for AE that you requested.
Smoothkit for AE
https://www.revisionfx.com/products/smoothkit/features/https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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By “wire plugin”, are you referring to CC Simple Wire Removal? Because it cannot bend. There are two control points, and you adjust the displacement between them in a straight line. So you must be referring to something else. Can you please be more specific?
And thank you for recommending the SmoothKit plugin… I am very familiar with it. But plugins are not what I was requesting. I am asking for techniques that people use in real production projects for hair flyaway removal and compositing beauty enhancements. A plugin is not an answer. It may be a tool people use, but the core techniques and layered effects are key in knowing how to resolve any variety of shots.
Please be extremely descriptive if you have suggestions for certain techniques. Saying “bite the bullet and use the clone stamp” is not very helpful to someone who is asking for techniques they have never used before.
Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D -
1. Do you mean sparkling skin, rosy cheak enhancements? etc…
2. do you want a ae clone tut?
3. The cc simple wire remover can use slope to get around small curves, but 180 curves you need to be a little more creative. I’ll give away a secret that hollywood uses to remove curved wires/ropes. Open the effects control of the project file and enable the last 4 plugins, the curved blue hair will magically disappear from the background. cc bender unwraps the curve then wire removes it and finally picture is un-bended. This all gets motion tracked in realtime in the big movies because removing them by hand can take 9 months or more.
cc wire unwrap example
https://www.megaupload.com/?d=0Z3PLP2Shttps://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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Thank you for the AE project file, Chris. Now THAT is the type of technique I’m hoping to hear more of. Unfortunately, months down the line this thread may not help other people because that project file may be gone. But using CC Bender to straighten a curved line, then CC Simple Wire Removal to remove the line, and finally CC Bender to reverse the corrected bend… that’s a solid example of a good technique, in my opinion. I still think tracking a hair flyaway to make this technique work, would be a lot more hassle in AE. But until someone else posts a better example of a technique, this one is pretty good.
As for your 1 and 2 questions, it’s been hard enough to get any sort of “secrets” revealed from people about how to do these sorts of cleanup, so let’s stick to the example of removing unwanted hair flyaways. Things like blemishes could fall under similar techniques. I’m not looking for sparkling skin or rosy cheek enhancements. I’m talking more about removing unwanted distractions in a shot.
And so finally, yes, a tutorial on using the clone stamp tool in AE for removing such unwanted hair flyaways would be wonderful, as I haven’t been able to find one online. Or even some sort of discussion as to methods, steps, or techniques that for some reason are labeled as “hollywood secrets”. I realize a lot of this is guarded, but hopefully people such as yourself are interested in support sites like this one which could help people learn REAL techniques. Of course, there is no substitute for diving into it and learning by trial and error. But I’m still interested to hear how other people approach these shots.
Fine Art Drawings | Photography | Compositing | VFX | Titles | Keying | 3D
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