In the age of cameras equipped with ultra sharp lenses and highly sensitive sensors, we’re seeing more detail than ever before in images on screen. Akin to digital make-up and filters, Beauty Studio was designed to automate the process of eliminating wrinkles, pores and other undesirable blemishes from facial skin tones.

The Beauty Studio filter comes from the Boris FX Continuum filter set.

Diffusion.

There are two stages to using Beauty Studio: 1) building a matte to isolate the skin tone and 2) smoothing the skin tone. Pay close attention when generating the matte as a poor matte will yield an unnatural image. Ideally, the matte should exclude areas such as eyes, hair, and lips to ensure that the smoothing operation does not introduce unwanted changes in these regions. To generate a good matte, it is helpful to display the Matte in the View menu.

The Color A and Color B parameters in the Matte group should be used to select typical colors toward the mid-range of the skin tones. Avoid selecting skin tones at the extreme light/dark ranges. Instead, choose a pair of representative colors from regions that are typical of the overall or average skin tones. Then, adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Softness controls as necessary to refine the matte.

Once the matte is refined, set the smoothing by adjusting how much is applied at each detail level. Natural looking results are generally obtained by using small amounts of smoothing for the smallest detail levels. This ensures that very fine skin details, such as pores or fine hairs, will be partially preserved to avoid an overly smoothed, plastic or airbrushed result. Higher smoothing amounts for the larger detail levels is generally recommended as way to smooth wider blemishes, color blotches, and unwanted highlights. The ideal smoothing settings will vary from image to image depending on the type and size blemishes in the image.

To select a preset, choose one from the Presets tab.

Determines the amount of smoothing.

This is the main smoothing controller. Settings between 100 and 200 will overdrive the smoothing effect on all active smoothing levels.

Affects only the smallest details in the image using a 1×1 pixel array.

Affects a pixel array twice the size of the smallest pixels.

Affects a pixel array twice the size of the small pixels.

Affects a pixel array twice the size of the medium pixels.

Affects a pixel array twice the size of the large pixels.

Faster processing, but lower quality.

Higher quality, but slower processing.

Determines the number of detail levels to be smoothed in the image. A value of 1 means only fine detail is smoothed, while a setting of 5 smooths the image over 5 independently controllable levels of detail.

Prevents loss of contrast in the result. Higher values preserve more contrast.

Modifies the size of the pixel arrays used for smoothing. Depending on the image, this can be used to reduce unwanted shine in skin tones.

Select typical colors toward the mid-range of the skin tones. Avoid selecting skin tones at the extreme light/dark ranges. Instead, choose a pair of representative colors from regions that are typical of the overall or average skin tones.

Choose a primary skin tone color for the matte.

Choose a secondary skin tone color for the matte.

Expands or contracts the hue values of the selected colors.

Expands or contracts the saturation values of the selected colors.

Expands or contracts the luma values of the selected colors.

Makes black areas of the matte blacker.

Makes white areas of the matte whiter.

Adjusts the matte gamma.

Shrinks the matte.

Blurs the matte.

Inverts the matte.

Go to the Color Correct node to see how the Color Correct controls work.

Enables the glow.

Limits the glow to the skin-tone matte.

Determines the blend mode to be used to create the glow.

Glow is added to the image.

Glow is combined with the image using a Screen blend mode. This looks kind of like the Add blend mode, but highlights are retained.

Sets the brightness of the glow.

Sets the glow color. The Color parameter sets the color of the glow through the use of a standard color picker. The default color is white.

Sets the softness of the glow.

Sets the pixel values that are affected by the glow--a setting of 0 will apply a glow to the entire image, while a setting of 100 will not apply any glow at all.