Beauty Part One

Advanced Beauty Grading Part One : The Corrections

December 15, 2014

Advanced Beauty Grading is quite a dark art in the world of color grading. Dan shows you his approach to beauty grading on a commercial.


Series
Day 15: 25 Insights in 25 Days Holiday Marathon

Advanced Beauty Grading Part One: The Corrections

One of the most requested topics here on mixing light is working with skin tones and working in beauty situations.

Your requests have been answered and this is my first part on a series that dives into the world of Advanced Beauty Grading.

This is quite advanced! I’m assuming you already know how to mask, key and track quite well in Resolve and so I am focusing purely on the image in this insight.

It’s also quite a long insight at 17mins long. Apologies for running a little long on this insight I just found there is no shortcuts when it comes to beauty work and wanted to show my exact step by step approach to the work.

In this insight which is part one we take a look at a great image and inspect it on a pixel by pixel basis. One first impression it looks quite good but as we go on you can see a huge difference correcting patchy skin tones and controlling contrast can have.

Check out my insight below to find out more!

– Dan

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Comments

Homepage Forums Advanced Beauty Grading Part One : The Corrections

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  • RazvanDimitriu
    Guest

    now that’s good stuff!


  • Guest
    Guest

    Love this series, looking forward to part 2 and future insights into more intense beauty work

  • This type of “corrective” beauty fixes has been a lot of my work recently. Really helps to see your suggestions and style. Many thanks. Looking forward to the “next level”.

    PS is Discus acting strange neww anyone else or is it just me? I have a new acct linked to my mixinglight acct

  • Jason, you’re not alone. Things are just updated on the backend for what concerns the comments. What I suggest for now: go on disqus.com and enter your usual login and password. Then, go to settings, and then click on the last tab called ‘Merging’. Disqus will recognize the new ‘wrong’ account and will let you merge it with your old one. Worked for me.


  • Marc Wielage
    Member

    Very well-done. This is a far better approach than people who want to try to do all of this kind of work with just a plug-in.


  • EugineYavtushenko
    Guest

    great!
    but I got one question. wouldn’t hue vs. hue curves help to deal with magenta?


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Jason – As Christophe said, we’ve switched Disqus so you’re automatically logged in when logging into the site. We’re still working out kinks for those members who have commented in the past. For those who never commented before, they’ll find they can do so now without creating a Disqus account.

    But as you can see – I’m having trouble linking my previous user Settings to this ‘new’ setting (which you should be able to do as Christophe just pointed out). It didn’t work for me, yet. Once we have this solved, I’ll put up a blog post on all this…

  • In photoshop you can use the high pass filter to target contrast at various frequencies. I wonder if there is a way in resolve to do the same? There is a beauty box openfx plugin that could help with skin smoothing. http://www.digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/main.html

  • Thanks guys! Merged successful


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Excellent. Now I need to get my merge worked out. I just opened another Support ticket with Disqus…

  • I’ve had extensive experience w Beauty Box in AE and recently in Resolve. Its an AWESOME plug-in, but it just doesnt replace hand beauty work we’re talking about here. Its fantastic for working on lots of shots quickly, and evening out some skin (especially pushing it w a slight hue or saturation to reduce a cast or bring out some color). It does have an adjustable skin “blur smooth”, which I like to reduce quite a bit, as its a bit much IMO. The shine reduce is very nice for rebuilding highlights in skin naturally. It’s masking features work really well, but DO tend to grab a lot of the background so I tend to use the plug-ins mask PLUS a mask in resolve to protect. That being said, Im working on a project w hundred of shots w “skin” retouching and coloring and BB has made those shots significantly easier. Yes, i could have done it by hand, but the budget does not allow it, and thats where this plug-in shines. Where you need SOME results, but clients cant afford the time for the true beauty work, I usually will try the plug-in route. Long story short: nothing you can’t do yourself, but it does speed things up. A trained manual hand will ALWAYS look better tho. Hope that helps, and give the demo a go.

    Also tried portraiture video OFX, but just didnt measure up to Beauty Box.


  • vincenttaylor
    Guest

    Really great Dan. I especially like your approach of staying away from blurs and as a result the picture feels really ‘honest’
    With your use of contrast and hue and the actor still looks like her and not a piece of plastic. 🙂


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Nice Jason. Great review. Thanks for sharing!

  • Here is a project I did this weekend using frequency separation to remove wrinkles

    I used the power grade below and use node sizing to slide texture over the wrinkles. I also applied beauty box as well at the end.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/u62jt7dvywgncid/Skin_Smoothing_LinearLight_Node_Tree.drx

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

  • Very good results, Greg! What exactly are you doing w the node sizing? (Im following the frequency seperation convo on that thread w the powergrade). Just not quite grasping ur description on Vimeo. Thanks and very nice work!

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