Skin Smoothing

[Jason Jenkins]

[Jim Giberti] “Any thoughts on skin smoothing in X?”

The “cartoon” effect at 70% or so can look pretty nice.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

Check out my Mormon.org profile.

[Jim Giberti]

[Jason Jenkins] “The “cartoon” effect at 70% or so can look pretty nice.
“

Thanks Jason,

Yeah, unfortunately there’s no way to isolate skin and leave the critical eye focus, hair detai etc.. They’re just one step away with the Color Board.

[Mark Dobson]

Hi Jim,

A very quick and effective skin smoothing technique is to simply duplicate the clip you want to apply skin smoothing to and place it directly above.

Apply a gaussian blur at about 5% to the lower clip.

Change the blend mode of the upper clip to ‘add’ at an opacity of around 40%.

Obviously all these parameters can be adjusted ad-infinitum.

To only affect the face will require slightly more compositing with masks. ( Mask8 points Alex4D )

Mark

[Jim Giberti]

Thanks Mark,

I was specifically looking for a keying program for X like EMA. There’s way too much involved in moving masks and layers when you’re used to high end keying. Fortunately after talking with Peter Sheffield about EMA I realized that Magic Bullet had released Cosmo as a stand alone for FCPX just last week. It’s a direct smoothing plug based on Colorista and Looks but much faster to facilitate and speed is what I need for all this grading and rendering.

So i just downloaded it a while ago and have a few spots already finished that were in the queue. I might even like this better than EMA, and it renders very fast. For $99 you should check it out.

[Ian Bailey]

I’ve been wondering whether this can be achieved with the new Keyer in 10.0.3. I’ve not tried it, but this is a possible solution:

– Dup the shot twice so you have three versions. One will be the background, one the smoothed skin foreground and one the alpha channel.

– Apply the Keyer effect to one of the shots and choose the skin colour. Invert the effect (you want to keep your selection) and change the view to the alpha channel and make sure it is just the skin that’s selected and not features that need to stay sharp such as eyes or hair. Use the Soften slider to soften the edges of the matte. This is now your alpha channel clip.

– Apply a Gaussian blur to the clip that’s going to be your foreground and set the Amount so the skin looks smooth. Apple the Image Mask effect to the same clip. Make sure Source Channel is set to alpha and make your alpha channel clip the Mask Source. It’s important that the Gaussian and Image Mask effects are applied in the right order, otherwise the blur will also effect the new alpha channel.

– Place the foreground clip above the background clip.

– You should be able to Disable the alpha channel clip.

If that doesn’t work let me know and I’ll do a proper test. I’m excited about the new Keyer as I reckon I can now use it to do all the advanced secondary and fx stuff I used to do in Color.

[Jim Giberti]

I’m with ya Ian but even in Color, we used EMA because it’s much faster to get great tones. I have some nice presets that got great results. I doubt that the keyer in X will ever get that kind of power but if they simply allowed throwing a gaussian blur directly into the color board they’d have a fast and slick way to grade and smooth skin.

[Simon Ubsdell]

Hi Jim

I suspect you are probably looking for something more sophisticated but here’s a template I have made using my proprietary keyer, because the Motion keyer is not publishable to FCPX.

3667_tkyskinsmoother.zip

The default is a median skin tone but there are controls to adjust it to your particular image source. (Note that I used to be able to provide a colour picker with this but the option has disappeared as a result of either the latest Motion or FCPX release.) Adjust the RGB colour sliders as necessary (or use the Mac color interface) and use the supplied sliders to firm up the key.

You can also blur the key, which as you say is a very important requirement.

There is a 4-point mask (with adjustable edge roundness and feathering) with onscreen controls so you can isolate the are that you want to key.

The “smoothing” controls are for gaussian blur, contrast and brightness and saturation. Of course, it would be a very easy matter to add in any other filters that you think would help get the job done.

Hope it’s of some interest.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Michael Hadley]

FYI, Magic Bullet Looks 2 now incorporates the Cosmo skin smoothing plug in (and many aspects of Colorista, from what I can tell). They were running a 50% off deal through the 8th but I read in another forum that the discount is still valid. I’m new to MB/Cosmo but the skin smoothing function looks very useful.

[Mark Dobson]

[Jim Giberti] “Fortunately after talking with Peter Sheffield about EMA I realized that Magic Bullet had released Cosmo as a stand alone for FCPX just last week. It’s a direct smoothing plug based on Colorista and Looks but much faster to facilitate and speed is what I need for all this grading and rendering.”

Jim,

Yes Cosmo is included within MBL2 which I bought last weekend. I’ll take a look at Cosmo next time I need to smooth things out.

Be nice if it worked on bank statements!

[Jim Giberti]

Just a quick follow-up on Cosmo. It isn’t a stand alone app for FCPX. I didn’t realize this and it would have saved me some sleep if I had. Anyway Red Giant support was great (woke me up trying to get that sleep) and I had to upgrade to the full Looks package to get Cosmo.

I don’t know how much of the rest I’ll practically use but Cosmo is doing exactly what I needed. It’s not as full featured as it could be (version 1.0) but it took no time to work out the interface and the results are great and fast rendering.