1DX Mk II video

jcs · September 29, 2016

53 minutes ago, independent said:

And resolution isn't the only factor for flattering actors. For one, talent with good skin. It's a cruel business. Next, makeup artists, lighting, focal length, shooting distance, lens characteristics, filters.

Another way to make actors/models look better is with special software tools. For stills: http://www.portraitprofessional.com/ (amazing time saver! I turn down the effects most of the time to look more natural). For video: https://www.digitalanarchy.com/beautyVID/main.html . Neat Video in PP CC track-masked to just the face and re-grained works pretty well too.

For fellow iOS/GPU coders out there, you can create a nice skin-smoother that runs in real-time on an iPhone using a bilateral filter (available in GPUImage: https://github.com/BradLarson/GPUImage ). Beauty Box probably uses a bilateral filter or similar, and only runs the filter on the skintone color range pixels (part of the complete continuous mask, not just stray pixels).

Cameras that have a 'skin smoother' option also likely use some form of a bilateral filter along with face and skintone detection.

I'm surprised there aren't more post tools / plugins which run on the GPU for doing pretty radically cool things with faces/skin in real-time. Especially localized effects which aren't possible with cameras/lenses/filters.

For rapid turn-around / vloggers / live shoots, cameras which makes skin look amazing can be very useful- someday that will be a bullet point option with a lot of competition. Time saved in post is money in the bank. Current hardware can easily do this in real-time now (iPhone, Sony & Samsung, perhaps Panasonic embedded hardware (Canon may be doing something basic with skintone color right now, though apparently affecting entire scene color)). After removing detail/wrinkles/blemishes it's important to re-grain/re-texture, else it looks fake. Haven't seen any commercial products of any kind which do this yet.