Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome Corey Martinez to our roster of Contributors, here on MixingLight.com. You can find out more about Corey on his Author Page. He is focusing on Baselight-related Insights, and begins with beauty techniques. Premium members, please join us in welcoming him to Mixing Light, in the Comments below!
– Pat
Skin smoothing and blemish removal on Baselight
As colorists, we know that clean, well-balanced skin is often the benchmark for a successful grade, especially in beauty, fashion, and commercial work. But there are times when the grade alone isn’t enough to address complex skin issues.
In this Insight, we’ll dive into targeted techniques using Baselight’s internal tools and free GLSL shaders to achieve high-end beauty results. You’ll learn how to tackle everything from aggressive skin cleanup to subtle texture refinement, while maintaining natural tone, preserving pore detail, and avoiding that overly retouched look.
Key takeaways from this Insight
By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:
- Use ‘Face Perspective’ to give us a track for the face.
- Offset a foreground mask to remove blemishes easily.
- Blurring shapes without increasing their size.
- Use paint strokes to sample ‘clean’ areas of the skin with a 1-point tracker.
- Using the open-source CROK Beauty shader to blur high-frequency details for skin smoothing.
External Links
- Free GLSL Shaders – From the Matchbox website, these shaders are the equivalent of OFX plugins in Resolve, for systems like Baselight and Flame.
- Artist.io – This link takes you to the shot I used in this Insight. You can download it for free, with a watermark, but you must create an account.
Related Mixing Light Insights
- Tutorial Series: Learning Baselight LOOK / Student – Luke Ross has a 20-part series on learning Baselight, from zero. This is the series page.
- Practical Beauty Color Grading Level One: Quick and Effective – Sometimes, even offering the smallest level of beauty work for a client can go a long way. Learn quick skin-smoothing / eyebag-reducing tips.
- ResolveFX Surface Tracker Part 2 – Executing Beauty Work Within Fusion – Igor Ridanovic leverages the stabilization work of the new Surface Tracker plugin to execute beauty work on the Fusion page.
- The Fundamentals of Color Correcting for Beauty – This is one of the earliest Insights on Mixing Light, and shows you how to do this with tools that have been shipping for over a decade: “Have you ever needed to improve how an actor ‘looks’ in a video? Learn the basics of how the pros do it in this Beauty Grading 101 video.”
- Understanding Frequency Separation Using The ‘Contrast Pop’ ResolveFX – Using the ‘Contrast Pop’ ResolveFX plugin, learn about frequency separation in Part 5 of Hector Berrebi’s ‘Texture Management’ series.
Questions or Comments? Leave a comment!
Is this Insight useful to you? Let me know! I’m really interested in hearing what more of these types of Baselight tutorials Mixing Light members want me to cover 😁
– Corey
