Advanced Beauty Grading: Applying Stills Techniques To Video

Its faster and safer to do the cloning on the frequency separation texture layer. Thats the whole point of frequency separation. Then you do the dodge/burn on the color layer. You can use your midtone detail on just the color layer so it doesn’t look fake because your texture is not blurred. If you use your black and white helper layer without separating color and texture u can spend a lot of time correcting texture only to find out that there are weird color variations that u didn’t even see.

Hey Greg,

Totally get what you mean on the black and white layer. I normally turn it on and off as I’m making corrections but I think I may have crammed a little too much into this insight and rushed that part.

On the frequency separation side of things I didn’t plan on using it at all during this insight but it’s something I should consider. I just figured having 50-60 nodes between the setup for the separation and then all the cloning layers might be quite confusing for people to follow on the screen capture.

I think I should do a bolt on insight that combines all the techniques together in a proper setup once I’ve gone through all the components. Especially for the midtone detail on color only I have found that gives me such lovely even skintone that it’s a must to share with people!

Looking forward to having Resolve 12 to make those node structures much much neater!

Thanks for those tips though I will make sure to address that in part 2!

Great series here Dan. Having just spent 2 days matching video to retouched stills I was really interested to see your approach (and reassured to hear how long you would expect to spend on it!). Love the B&W contrast layer tip.

Hi Dan, I’ve been coming back to your series on beauty grading. I’ve heard you speak a couple of times about advising the client to do a painting session in Flame or Fusion. Would this normally happen before or after the color grade?

I am trying to find out the best workflow to do this. Thanks! Remco

Hey Remco!

Normally after the grade is best. I do as much as possible in the grade and then send it off to flame guys for a little paint and cloning love.

If they need any grade changes they will then get re-graded by me after the beauty work again for a final color pass.