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Correcting/Evening Faces (Redness and whatnot)

Beatlesfan1225

Beatlesfan1225

Hey Everyone,

So, I was curious about what one might do if put in this situation - Say in your filming, there's an actor or actress that has sections of their face that are a bit red or flush. (Perhaps they have rosacea or whatever) Or maybe they have some acne that's overly red. Now, you'd probably want to correct these sorts of things with makeup before shooting, but for argument's sake, let's say you didn't.

Is there a way while color correcting the film to even out the coloring on their face a bit? I'm just curious because this is a problem I've noticed during one of my filmings in the past.

I edit with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 or Vegas Pro (whatever I feel like using, usually the latter but I'm working to learn the former better) and I have the whole Adobe Suite, meaning I can use Speedgrade CS6 for color correction.

Thank you!

EDIT: To give a bit of context to the situation, let me also explain one example of why I'm interested - I have an actor I shoot w/ frequently that has a lot of natural redness towards the center of his forehead, between the eyes, mostly. It's fairly noticeable on film, so a couple shoots ago we also had our make-up artist do some makeup on him. However, he was still fairly red, and got increasingly so throughout the day again.

That's why I was just curious if I could also go in in post-production and clean up some things like that with good color correction.
 
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in addition, you can use some noise reduction to reduce the impact of acne. To much and everything looks plastic, but a bit can help make it less noticeable. You know how sometimes your lite it funny and little bumps you though were covered with makeup sorta stand up and say "Im ready for my close up!" .. yeah that..
 
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Best soloution is to go into after effects bring in the footage make an adjustment layer. Animate a mask to the area you want to effect, feather the mask and grade the red area down abit. Prehaps add a blur at the end. If its a spot or acne grading wont rly work all the time because grading will affect the areas between the spots too. To fix acne what you can do is duplicate the footage so you have two. On the top layer make a mask around the acne and animate, subtract it so you can see the lower layer. Now feather the mask you just made and move the bottom layer a bit so what your doing is cutting a hole in the top layer removing the spot and shifting the lower to patch it with good skin. Another good way (not sure if after effects can do this) is for small spots use a errode so it takes pixels from the outside of the mask and brings them inwards. In photoshop think its called pinch, same effect rly.
 
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Yup, secondary color correction masked and tracked to the specific target area.

Here's an example of the basic technique you'll want. This is in resolve, but should be doable with speedgrade and other tools as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL_hWR60LaA

I disagree with the way he's adjusting the softness of his mask. Generally, in my opinion, more feathering/softness is better than less otherwise you risk your masked adjustment being obvious and sticking out like a sore thumb.
 
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Thank you very much everyone! This was extremely helpful. And thank you for the video Will, that was certainly very informative. I'll be employing these tactics next time I film and want to clean up some faces.

Also, couldn't you use these tactics for just about anything? For example, if you have an actor with teeth that need to be a bit whiter? Or perhaps a bit yellower? Just a thought.

Thanks all!
 
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Beatlesfan1225 said:
Also, couldn't you use these tactics for just about anything? For example, if you have an actor with teeth that need to be a bit whiter? Or perhaps a bit yellower? Just a thought.
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Yessir. Or trees you want to be purple instead of green, a car you wish were a bit more red than blue, or even to the extreme, something like pleasantville. (though a good portion of pleasantville was also done in camera)
 
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Will Vincent said:
Yessir. Or trees you want to be purple instead of green, a car you wish were a bit more red than blue, or even to the extreme, something like pleasantville. (though a good portion of pleasantville was also done in camera)
Click to expand...

That's an excellent point!

I'm writing the third part of the Doctor Who series I've been shooting and releasing lately - I think I'll play around with some of this stuff to create a bit more abstract looking 'planet.'
 
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