In this tutorial series for After Effects we use the free plugin Skin Retouch to do professional beauty work in After Effects. The series covers

  • smoothing the skin while preserving the details of the skin texture
  • blemish and wrinkle removal
  • adding make-up
  • tracking
and much more.

Beauty Retouch in AE - Overview

This video gives an overview about what we are going to do in the beauty retouch tutorial series for After Effects.
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Beauty Retouch in AE Part 1: Detail-preserving Skin Smoothing with Free Plugin

In the first part, we learn how to smooth the skin without destroying the fine details of the skin texture. Most simple skin smoothing approaches have the issue that they eliminate those skin details which results in a fake, plastic-like look. The Skin Retouch plugin offers a quick end easy solution to preserve those details which gives you much better results.
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Beauty Retouch in AE Part 2: Wrinkle and Blemish Removal

While the first part focused on smoothing the entire skin, in this second part we focus on specific, problematic spots like blemishes or wrinkles. We use the clone stamp tool to remove them and use mocha tracking to move the clone stamp strokes with the face.
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Beauty Retouch in AE Part 3: Digital Make-up

In the third part we add some digital makeup to the face. Of course, usually it is better to make sure the model is made up as desired before filming, but here we show how to fix it in post. The technique can be used no matter whether you want to add new make-up or find-tune existing one.
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Beauty Retouch in AE Part 4: Effective Face Tracking with the Mask Tracker

In this part we focus in using the mask tracker built into After Effects for face tracking. The face tracker has an automatic feature to detect the outline of the face, but often the result is not 100% accurate. Hence, we show an easy workflow to fix the track using the "name your own price" extension KeyTweak.

We also show how to remove wrinkles on the moving face using stabilized precomps which we create with MaskTracker+.

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