From the course: After Effects Guru: Plugins You Should Know

Enhancing beauty with After Effects built-in effects - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Plugins You Should Know

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Enhancing beauty with After Effects built-in effects

“

- Like previous chapters, we're going to take a look at how we can enhance beauty in After Effects without first going to 3rd party tools. In this movie, we're going to take a look at working with the Mask Tracker along with the Lumetri Effect. So After Effects has a variety of effects and masking techniques that you can use to perform beauty-based corrections. In this movie, we'll take a look at the chapter 0301 composition. So you can select that from your chapter 3 folder. I'm going to select the clip in the composition and head over to the effect menu. And let's start off by looking at the Color Correction category and we'll select Lumetri Color. Lumetri is a shared effect between Premier and After Effects. You can choose the way you want to work in here. So if someone is more comfortable with Photoshop, notice you have curves. If someone is more comfortable with video-based color correction, you've got your color wheels. So the basic idea here is that you can go to any one of these panels and work the way you want. Now, if you have the latest version of After Effects installed, there's a new section called HSL Secondary adjustments that have been included, as well. And if I hit the disclosure triangle, I can actually pull a key from the shot. So I'm going to sample a color from the lady's face. I'll select the eye dropper, and once I click here with the eye dropper, you can see here that I've selected a pixel. Now let's select another one. I'm going to add another color to the mix by choosing the eye dropper next to Add color and we'll select a brighter pixel. But to see what I'm selecting, I'm actually going to bring up the Info menu which I can do by going to Window Info and as I have my eye dropper over the scene, I can see what I'm selecting. Just going to hit this escape button and I'm going to click on the eye dropper and hover over the composition window and you can see the pixel that I'm currently over. I'll select this now, and with these two pixels that I've selected, these two colors, I want to be able to see the mask that I've created temporarily. So I'll click here, and now I can see what's selected. And the idea is that I can use these three HSL sliders, hue, saturation, and lightness, to refine my color-based selection. So let me choose, instead of color and gray, color and black. I'm going to start to play with the hue slider, let me drag that a bit more. If I start to drag the top triangle, just notice what happens to the range of colors selected. Now I'm going to drag the bottom slider as well. And let's now move onto the saturation slider, see if we can get a bit more of the cheeks. And I'll start to now play with the bottom triangle. Now onto the lightness slider where we can refine it even more. And we can see that there's a few extra pixels in the hair that we can refine here by just playing with these sliders and being patient. Now besides these sliders, I can refine the selection by denoising the shot and also introducing a little bit of blur. So I'll add a blur of two. And let me go back and turn off the Show Mask button. This is now the time where we can change what we have selected, the HSL corrections, and this is all done in the correction section. You have a choice here between a one-way and a three-way color corrector. Let's go to the one-way color corrector and start to play with the contrast over here. I'll follow that up by changing the hue to change her skin tone. We can also play with the temperature, the tint, and as you see here, sharpen. Now when I drag on sharpen it looks aggressive until you release it, you'll see what the sharpen does when you let go of the slider. So let me also up the saturation, going to make that 105. So this is one adjustment I can do out of many here with this Lumetri color effect. It's always good to look at your adjustments and go to the effects badge and effect controls to turn it off and on so you can see the before and after results. Now if the colors in the shot were so similar to something else like this, let's say the pole, was really similar in color to the skin tones of the woman, I could do further isolation by combining shape masks with this HSL secondary selection. Just keep in mind, this is just a taste of how you can use After Effects's built-in tools for beauty-based correction.

Contents