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Zit removal?
Yeah, zit removal. Something I wish I could have done as a teenager. Adtually, in this case I’m working on a video with some teenage students — a pro bono job for their school. The cameraman shot the interviews on extreme close-up, a bit tighter than I want. Anyway, one absolutely primo soundbite is with this girl who has very light colored skin and quite a clear complexion. On the side of her chin, though, are three quite visible zits which frankly don’t bother me. I’ve been told, however, that I’ll have to kill the shot if I can’t do something about the zits because the girl apparently would be mortified to see these in extreme close-up.
Like I say, this is a pro bono job so I can’t hire someone to do this. I am somewhat proficient in After Effects; I understand it and know my way around the interface. But I am certainly not an expert. Do you folks hear have any suggestions how I can at least minimize the visibility of these zits? If I can, I sure would like to avoid having to paint them out frame-by-frame. Yes, they are moving because she is talking in a fairly animated way.
Anyway, any suggestions much appreciated.
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7 Replies
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I’ve done my share of zit removal but it’s not easy if your subject is jumping around. Vector Paint is made for this sort of thing. Just grab a color of the face next to the zit and size your brush with some feathering. Then just blot the zits frame by frame. It actually goes quickly once when you get started. Hopefully the shot isn’t too long.
Bill O’Neil
http://www.chicagospots.com -
try using GLOW in afx production bundle, it’s under “STYLIZE’ in effects. play with thresh-hold & intensity & radius in screen or add mode. used subtly it sometimes works like diffusion filter to smooth out facial boo-boo’s.
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Better yet, take a track of the movement you should be able to track her eyes or nostrel if she doesn’t look away. Anyway see if there is somthing you can track. Then create your vector paint (bruash, Blur, and opacity) and map this to the track.
It will skip a litle so after you map render and fix any keyframes that are way off.
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Can’t you just track the zits themselves? (I don’t have AE Pro . . .)
David Oulashian
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Thanks for the suggestions! This gives me the reason/opportunity to try out some things in AE that I hadn’t tried before.
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LIGHTEN mode.
Any time you have specs or dots or small things, Think about what makes them different from the part you do want. If the zit is darker than her light complexion than exploit that. I have done in one trick what would have taken a loooong time to vector paint out:
First open your tracker and get a good track on the zit. It does NOT have to be dead on. But get it to ride along with it. Apply the data to a null layer.
Create a solid. Make a small circle shaped mask in the middle of the solid (anywhere on the solid really). Now parent this solid layer to the null. Your little circle should track in sync with the zit. Now just grab the circle layer in the comp window and move it right over the zit. You may want to drop the transparency to half way to make sure it is right over it (but put the transparency back to 100%). Now the circle should track right over the zit the whole time.
Now, Create a duplicate of the girl layer. Add a gauss blur to it. Crank up the blur a lot till you can see the zit on her face wash out and the color of her skin around it bleeds over it. Obviously the whole image will blur out, but ignore it and just crank it till the zits wash out.
Now put your solid (the one with the circle mask) just above your duplicate footage with the blur. On the duped footage set the track matte to alpha.
This duped footage should be on top of your original girl layer. So now at this point you have a very visible blur circle tracking right on top of the zit. Now for the magic part. Set the transfer mode on the blur duplicate to LIGHTEN. Now only the darker zit pixels will let blurred pixels show through. Now just tweak your blur amount and the size of the circle (although this should not be too critical, only that it covers the problem areas) and the zit should almost just vanish.
I’ve used this on a window with splotches all over it and made it look like a perfectly clean piece of glass with out any painting what-so -ever.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
Great, Chris. Thanks! I’ll give that a go today.
Lee
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