Beauty Box 6.0 is finally here with a new plugin that uses our new A.I. suite to do Shine Removal!

In This Post:
– Shine Mask
– Eye/Mouth Mask
– Shine Mask vs Beauty Box’s Skin Mask
– After Effects Only Features
– Video Tutorials (this post is just a brief overview, watch the videos to go in depth!)

We’ve improved some other behind-the-scenes stuff like speed on Silicon chips, a better mask in Beauty Box, etc. but the biggest thing is Shine Removal.

Beauty Box has used A.I. since 1.0 by using face detection to build the skin mask that controls where the effect is applied. Over time we’ve improved that but 6.0 takes it to another level and dramatically improves the shine removal algorithm.

One problem we’ve had with shine removal in the past is that it had a tendancy of ‘de-shining’ eyes and teeth. By using A.I. we can now identify the eyes and mouth of talent and exclude those areas from the ‘Shine Mask’ which control what areas get de-shined.

Currently the A.I. algorithms are a bit slow. So if you turn on the Eye/Mouth mask it will slow things down. We’re working on that and will have an update to speed things up very soon. If you don’t use the Eye/Mouth mask then both Beauty Box and Shine Removal should run in real time.

It works similar to Beauty Box… you click Analyze Frame to have Shine Removal figure out the ‘shiny’ skin tones. And then dial in how much shine reduction you want. The thing that slows it down is that it’s analyzing faces on every frame if you’re using the Eye/Mouth Mask. So you can turn that off to speed it up… OR use After Effects which has some additional features! (see below)

The mask looks very different from Beauty Box’s mask as it’s just the bright areas of the skin instead of ALL the skin areas. But of course it’s for a different purpose since Beauty Box needs to identify all the skin areas. Shine Removal just wants to know which skin areas have shine.

After Effects Only Features

AE is a little different. It gives us the option of storing the face data, which other host apps don’t let us do. This means:

1) It’ll speed up rendering so you don’t have to run face detection on EVERY frame
2) The Eyes and Mouth are actually splines and you can save them out as AE masks! It’s a pretty cool feature that allows you to use those splines for other purposes or beauty work. We’ll be making more use of them in future updates.

Video Tutorials:

The Beauty Box 6.0 Intro tutorial is here!

Check out the tutorial on the After Effects features here!