Advanced Beauty Grading Part Two : The Fashion Look

Love the longer length, very in-depth look at the subject (even just touching the surface). Wold love to see more advanced insights similar to these, maybe some looks for narrative or music video? Many thanks Dan! Easily in my top 10 insights.

Great insight Dan, thank you man!

Two things I am curious to ask about. She is barely moving in this example so do you do this type of work on more complicated moving shots or send it to vfx? I’d love to see this type of work if so, where for example she is walking or turning her head, etc. and also I am curious about this level of detail when there are say a bunch of :30 – 1min pieces each with different actors (like the make-up web spot job I am working on now : ). The reason I ask these two things is because I find there is no time to do the teeth whitening, blemish fixes, etc when you have a lot of content to get through in two or three days…its just a lot of keyframing let alone tracking handles. I usually suggest a vfx pass in AE/Smoke//Flame when they need complicated retouching / beauty work and a lot of it done in a handful of days so its more of a team effort to reach the finish-line on time for client. I would however start doing more of this work in Resolve and/or AE/Fusion if they have the time and budget for me to also then tackle those hurdles on top of color.

You guys have been crushing the insights lately, thank you!!

In photoshop retouching with frequency separation is separating texture from color. A Gaussian blur is a low pass thus removing texture the opposite is the texture/hi pass. once you have separated the 2 you can address color variations without affecting texture. Here is an article going over the basics. http://phlearn.com/amazing-power-frequency-separation-retouching-photoshop
I wonder how to achieve this affect in resolve?

found this powergrade:

Lissage naturel de la peau |||| DaVinci Resolve

http://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/natural-skin-smoothing-davinci-resolve.2983/

VERY cool Greg – cheers 😉

Awesome greg! I’ll check that out and see if I could work out an insight from it!

Thanks man! I had so much fun with this

Hey Man!

Unfortunately the time required goes up a huge amount depending on the movement in the scene. I generally find there is a beauty “shot” that I see lots and lots which is a slow motion look down the lens and doesn’t have a huge amount of movement. I generally would try and have around 6 hours to a full day for a beauty commercial to replicate the detail I went into on this shot. I think I should try and do a broader strokes version of this grade for the days when you can’t go crazy!

When smoothing the skin at the end, is there any reason you’re using the mist tool instead of simply blurring it ? Does it make a difference between mist and blur in the end? Thank you in advance.

Would also like to know why you chose the mist tool instead of blur tool

Whoops – looks like Dan missed this question… the main reason is that Mist tries to preserve details and tends to feel more organic that a simple blur. I’m not sure if Dan has other reasons…

Totally did! Sorry about that guys. Yea I love using the mist tool as I find it preserves detail better. It works by over sharpening the image first and then blurring it so areas like eyelashes and eyebrows tend to be preserved a little better. My new love since it was introduced is the midtone detail control. It does such a great job of smoothing skin that you should try it out for sure!

I just recorded an insight that looks at this specifically and I’ll be uploading it tonight! Hope it helps show the difference between all the options.