silhouette-2024.5 : Nodes : Beauty Studio
Beauty Studio
Description
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.
Node Group
Diffusion.
Using Beauty Studio
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.
Matte Creation
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.
Smoothing
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.
Controls
Presets
To select a preset, choose one from the Presets tab.
Smoothing
Determines the amount of smoothing.
Master Amount
This is the main smoothing controller. Settings between 100 and 200 will overdrive the smoothing effect on all active smoothing levels.
Smallest Details
Affects only the smallest details in the image using a 1×1 pixel array.
Small Details
Affects a pixel array twice the size of the smallest pixels.
Medium Details
Affects a pixel array twice the size of the small pixels.
Large Details
Affects a pixel array twice the size of the medium pixels.
Largest Details
Affects a pixel array twice the size of the large pixels.
Quality
Fast
Faster processing, but lower quality.
Precise
Higher quality, but slower processing.
Detail Levels
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.
Preserve Contrast
Prevents loss of contrast in the result. Higher values preserve more contrast.
Detail Scale
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.
Matte
Color
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.
Color A
Choose a primary skin tone color for the matte.
Color B
Choose a secondary skin tone color for the matte.
Hue Softness
Expands or contracts the hue values of the selected colors.
Saturation Softness
Expands or contracts the saturation values of the selected colors.
Luma Softness
Expands or contracts the luma values of the selected colors.
Black Clip
Makes black areas of the matte blacker.
White Clip
Makes white areas of the matte whiter.
Gamma
Adjusts the matte gamma.
Choke
Shrinks the matte.
Blur
Blurs the matte.
Invert Matte
Inverts the matte.
Color Correct
Go to the Color Correct node to see how the Color Correct controls work.
Glow
Enable
Enables the glow.
Use Matte
Limits the glow to the skin-tone matte.
Blend
Determines the blend mode to be used to create the glow.
Add
Glow is added to the image.
Screen
Glow is combined with the image using a Screen blend mode. This looks kind of like the Add blend mode, but highlights are retained.
Brightness
Sets the brightness of the glow.
Color
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.
Blur
Sets the softness of the glow.
Threshold
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.