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Hi, my name is Darren Mostyn, I'm a professional colorist I've
been working with resolve for many years. Now, I want to show you some of my techniques on skin
smoothing using a particular effect called Beauty. So let's go take a look. Now what the beauty tool
is doing is working on frequency separation. So, again, it's quite similar to the Texture Pop
tool that I described in the last episode, but it works a little bit different. If
you're beginning and just starting out, there's a very good automatic mode. So this first
mode that you come to is just called automatic. Okay, and then there's an advanced mode
here. So in automatic mode what it's doing is it's pre defining the correct frequency that
would be generally skin tone. And it's putting a little bit of texture detail back in the higher
frequencies and so that gives you the texture back in the skin tones. It doesn't look all plastic. So
straight away I can go to the auto tools and just slide the amounts of this obviously amount of
smoothing, but go the other way this is coarsening and scale is obviously the amount of that so down
here at zero we are literally switching the effect off, and up here we are putting at full strength
so if I just tweak them a little bit, a little bit. in fact if I press shift then we can work
a nice full screen mode and still see our tools, and then dial in a bit of
Beauty - so if I press Command D There we go. Now one thing you got to
be very careful of with the beauty tool is that it's NOT isolating skin it's isolating
lower frequencies or medium mid mid frequencies, okay, which is generally skin tone. So we've got
to be careful of is that the rest of your image is not getting smooth at the same time. So let
me show you if I go to another clip. I've got this guy here. I've already applied beauty,
so let me show the node tree very quickly. So there's our exposure, here's our
beauty... this is for something we'll show you in a minute. And then this is
our colour space transform just taking this from Arri into REC 709 color space. So on
the beauty tool I haven't done anything to it, so lets press shift F and what we're gonna do is
start adding some smoothness. Now, It's obviously preset in Automatic mode to work on skintone and
put a little bit of texture back in automatically, but it's affecting everything in here - his suits
going - let me switch on and off, the doors going, the wallpapers even going so these are links for
medium to low frequency. So what we need to do generally when you're working with a beauty tool
is to isolate the area that you want to work with. So we're going to be in key or more general
how our user is or would use Windows. Let's just press F again. Go to our window tracking.
And Im literally going to draw around his face and I'm going to track it. So I've got the new
tracking tool where you just got this multi directional arrow so it doesn't matter where
I am on my clip I just press this once and it tracks forwards and backwards automatically.
So that's 17.4.1 I'm on. 17.4.2 has just been released. I'm not actually installed it yet. There
we go. So we've now got track on the face. Okay, so I'm going to go to my window, add a little bit
of softness to that. And now what we're doing on the Beauty tool is we're only working on the skin.
That's obviously a little bit harsh on so even in the automatic mode, I've got global blend here
which allows me to blend it back to the original. So let's take a look at the advanced features in
the beauty OFX - so I'm gonna go down here switch to advanced. And you see we've got now smoothing
and texture but we are now defining what that is whereas the automatic one was basically set for
good skin tone. So the smoothing threshold up here what this is doing to the right is obviously
smoothing to the left is coarsening and diffuse lighting is a different way of doing it. It's
a bit more like the mid tone detail tool that you have. And you see a function of that it just
basically changes it's not changing the lighting, it just looks like it's changing the lighting, but
it's actually sort of playing around with the sort of contrast a little bit. So a combination of the
two of these should get you pretty much where you want to be. So you see I'm hardly moving these
at all these are really small moves. And what I can do then is look at the texture recovery.
I'm going to pull some of that detail back. So texture threshold here. So this is preset to 0.4,
so it has got a little bit of threshold already. I can preview that here. And the preview allows
me to see how much texture we're bringing back. So remember texture is the higher frequencies.
It's things like hair and its pores, things like that. So we're just going to bring our level up
a little bit and switch that preview off, and Im going to dial in so obviously it's set to zero.
So it's not actually bringing any texture back. 4:49
and then I can slowly add texture back here so we get really nice soft skin and still with detail.
The feature recovery is looking at the edges, we can preview them that was there. So by default,
there's nothing coming back at all. There's nothing being recovered. But as I move this up,
you'll see whatever's White will be included in the recovery amount. So there we go, we get some
eyes back and lips and the main detail is coming back. Let me show you that. So, a combination
of these tools gets you really in a really good place and the global blend of course, always blend
back a little bit. I always I always blend back to something. Now there's another really good feature
in here. It's called Show split view. So what I'm gonna do is switch over to that. And what this is
doing now is showing me - this is my smoothing. So it's just the amount of smoothing I've got this.
Here is my texture recovery. This down here is the feature recovery. This is the final image. Now the
reason you're seeing a little bit sneaking through there is because I've got my global blend on. So
if I just pull that back, that clears that away, so I tend to take that off until the very end.
That's the last thing that I put in. So now if I change my smoothing threshold, let's see, this
one changes, and the final results is changing. So it's just a quick and easy way to see what you're
actually smoothing and what you're recovering. So now I'm going to switch that off, and I'm just
going to global blend back a little bit more. And there we go. Now one thing with the beauty
tool is one setting doesn't fix everything. Okay? So I often do with beauty tool or face
refine or wherever I'm working with is I would have more than just one node doing this. And
so in this instance, I want to do some work on her mouth here, but separate to the
settings I've got here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press SHIFT +F and add another
serial node and add the beauty tool again. And then I'm going to go back to my advanced tools
and then shift + F so we can see full screen and I'm now working on a second node - Im going to
undo that and in fact what I want to do because I actually want to work in parallel. The reason for
that is because I want to get the information from the lips from this node and NOT from this node.
I did a whole episode on parallels and how and why I use them so worth checking it out. So I'm
going to add a parallel node and add beauty tool and before I do anything Im going to isolate the
lips so what I'm going to do is draw a window just zoom in here so just middle mouse
clicking so that I can move around my window 7:38
and then Im going to draw and track that And then soften the window off as I always do and
go back to SHIFTF mode go to my advance tools. And what we're gonna do now is to smooth off this,
particularly the bottom lip here, but it's got a little bit of cracking and looks a little bit dry.
So I'm just gonna see if i can smooth off a bit 8:11 that's bringing our texture back in -
lets try some diffuse lighting aswell. And thats actually help him with that
sort of shine that she's got going round the outside of her lip - and Im going to add a bit
of texture back. Then Im going to blend that back. Press Command D see before and after - it's
looking much better. That really is helping this little shine here as well. So the beauty
tool is also available in the face refine tool, so why would I use it as a separate item here
when I could just go to the face refine tool. The main reason is, is that I can work anywhere
I want on on the face and I can even do it on maybe landscapes - I'm going to show you in a
minute that beauty doesn't just work on skin, we can use landscape keys on textures anything
you like. So in the face refine tool, you are limited to the face because the system analyses
facial features and that is what it works with. Now the Face Refine tool doesn't always follow the
face exactly sometimes it can drift a little bit so if you do eye lightening for example, as the
face refine tool just goes slightly off track. You'll then see the shape because coming
off the eyes so that's another reason why I like to just use the beauty tool sometimes to
save me having to rely on tracking the faces. Ive got a face refine already applied to this
node here. And yes, it's here in texture. And you can see here you've got the operating mode,
beauty and advanced. I did do a whole episode on the face refinement tool. So you may want to
check that out. It was for version 16 but the principles are very much the same. And you had
the beauty tool in there as well. So in texture, the operating mode, beauty advanced is in
the advanced mode. You've also got the beauty automatic, and you've even got just smoothing so
you just want to take the smoothing operations out there. You can do that. So that's all in
the face refinement tool. But if you want to be able to create your own masks and just track and
it's much quicker than just take the beauty tool. So it's not just skin smoothing that we want to
do. I know this episode is about skin smoothing. But while I'm in the beauty tool, let me just
show you that we can adjust landscapes just as well using the Beauty Tool. So I've got a
regular clip here, it's Blackmagic footage, and I've got my colour space transform
here, converting me to REC 709, little bit of offset and some exposure work here and in
the middle node here. We've got our beauty tool, so I've done nothing to it. And this time. I'm
going to go to the let's see if that is enhancing the texture here - the sky is looking really
great, and that's just with the automatic mode and you can obviously set the degree there, or
you can still go in and fine tune that with all the advanced tools. So it really is a great tool
for skin smoothing or coarsening if you want to do coarsening. It is great on landscapes - think
about using multiple nodes when you're doing skin softening. You might want to do separate work on
eyebags you might want to separate work on lips, it's a little bit easier to use than the face
refine tool and doesn't take as long because it doesn't analyse the face to start which can take
a little bit of time depending on your system. So I hope that helps you with your skin smoothing
techniques. I managed to pass 30,000 subscribers last week so thank you so much. I am so grateful
for that. And if you haven't subscribed yet hit the subscription, hit the notification bell, do
all that sort of stuff. drop me comments. People wanted this they wanted me to do more on OpenFX
so I have done. I'm gonna do a few more as well. Look at yourselves and I'll
see you in the next episode.
