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retouching faces and clothing via after effects + photoshop
Has anyone done a lot of retouching such as adjusting wrinkles in clothing, brightening under eye bags a bit, dealing with messy or flyaway hairs, and doing general skin cleanup to a very high standard of quality for video footage. I can spot where there’s at least some light work done at times in recorded interviews. With makeup and hair commercials it’s incredibly obvious.
I’ve done this stuff for years on still imagery, but whenever I search for topics about realistic video retouching work it seems to return a lot of words about applying gaussian blur to a track matte. I’m interested in something more subtle. Any of you guys do this kind of work regularly where the full skin texture is kept intact? Are you doing a lot of frame by frame adjustments to get the look just right? How well do reshaping tools used in moderation translate for video footage?
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4 Replies
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I’d say that AE is generally not able to provide you with a toolset much beyond using Median or Dust & Scratches or a Blur (Bilateral Blur can allow you to maintain some texture, but it renders veeeerrry slowly) combined with a matte and masks.
You should be able to get pretty good results with this toolset though. Generating a matte from the skin tone, for example, and then using tracking and paint tools to alter the luma matte in some areas (intensifying or pulling back the correction).
Painting tools aren’t as useful in general in the video world as they are in Photoshop for these problems, but the Clone Stamp as well as painting into mattes can be useful.
Darby Edelen
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Any sort of frame-by-frame retouching will be very time-intensive to get the frames to match.
Andrew Kramer has a tutorial here on the COW
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/blemish_removal/video-tutorial.php
that has some good ideas in it. He uses the remove grain filter rather than blurring. You might also consider lowering the contrast with curves adjustment for a more subtle effect.I haven’t used them, but there are plug-ins designed to facilitate skin retouching. One of them is called (something like) Beauty Box, but I would think there are others.
Jim
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I have looked at plugins and stuff. I also reviewed posts made before on the forum involving grain removal, various kinds of blurring, etc. There must be some subtle detail work at the very least going through high end production houses that deals with really fine cleanup when necessary. I’d like to see it not actually feel retouched. Say bring out the color of the eyes a little, soften under eye bags slightly, clone out little things, and reduce things like facial fuzz, stray hairs, or rough skin/cellulite. I don’t mean obliterate them so much as just tone them down a bit so that the skin doesn’t need to receive overall softening from a filter based adjustment.
It may just end up being a lot of experimentation but would anyone happen to know of any other software that would be better for this? I thought of after effects because it integrates well with recent versions of photoshop and has a lot of similar painting tools. To me it looks kind of funky when the image is sharp and just the skin looks blurred. I imagine the grain removal idea might come out a bit more natural but I’d like it to be subtle enough to where no one can tell it was touched up.
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I agree with Darby that the Stamp or Clone tool might be the best way to go. Its very time consuming, but it will probably give you the best results.
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