Practical Beauty Work – Why You Need To Be Offering It

Easily Add More Revenue By Perfecting Beauty Work

I’ve recently started doing practical beauty work as part of my service as a freelance colourist.

As a colourist working in London on many fashion and high-end brand spots it was incredibly common for clean up and retouching to happen but I was never the one to do it.

I think the term ‘beauty work’ is a little misleading also. It alludes to something very specific, however in reality, it’s more of an overarching term for image retouching.

Here is an example of some typical requests i’ve had in the grading suite from minor to major:

• “Can we smooth out the creases in those trousers?”
• “Can we take away those eye bags and freshen her up”
• “Can we remove all those tattoo’s?”
• “The model is making the devil horns sign, need to change this to a thumbs up”
• “We like the head and neck from one take and the body from another. Can we combine these”

Obviously, there is a line between what is possible in the grade and what needs to be sent to compositors for proper retouching.

In this Insight, I’ll be focusing on what I’d like to call “practical beauty work”

What I mean by this term is basic clean up practices on people and, more importantly, what is actually achievable in DaVinci Resolve.

Another exciting prospect is, with Fusion being added to Resolve, what we can offer as colorists has increased by 10 fold.