The wait is over!
Beauty Box 6.5 is here with new AI-powered teeth and eye whitening, improved face detection, and a new GPU-powered inference engine for faster processing. Beauty Box Whiten automatically identifies the eyes, mouth, and teeth, while giving you control over the masks, color, smoothing, and feathering. Check this video for before and after examples!
But if you’re an After Effects user, there’s even more to explore. Beauty Box 6.5 introduces new facial spline capabilities that turn AI face-tracking data into editable After Effects masks. This means you can go beyond Beauty Box’s built-in retouching tools and use those masks with other AE effects for targeted color correction, creative effects, and much more.
Let’s take a look at what makes facial splines different and how you can use them in your After Effects workflow.
What Are Facial Splines?
Beauty Box 6.5 uses AI to identify and track specific areas of a subject’s face. Internally, Beauty Box creates vector splines for these facial areas. In most host apps there is no way of displaying them as splines, so you see black/white masks. However, in After Effects, those vector splines can be converted into native, editable AE masks.
Beauty Box can create masks for different facial features, including:
- Left and right eyes
- Left and right eyebrows
- Nose
- Lips
- Mouth
- Face
This gives editors a fast and reliable starting point for targeted facial adjustments. And unlike a mask created simply to control a Beauty Box effect, these masks can be taken into the wider After Effects workflow and used with other effects and adjustments.
Spend Less Time Masking and More Time Creating
Instead of manually creating and tracking masks for individual features, you can use Beauty Box 6.5 to generate the facial masks and then continue working with them directly in After Effects. This can be especially useful when working with moving subjects or shots where a facial feature needs a targeted adjustment.
Creating the masks with Beauty Box 6.5 is simple:
- Apply either Beauty Box Whiten or Beauty Box Shine Removal to your footage in After Effects.
- Scroll down in the Effect Controls and change “How Many Faces in Video” to the number of people in your clip.
- Click “Identify Faces” and let Beauty Box analyze the footage. Once the faces have been identified, click “Export to AE Masks”.
Beauty Box will create tracked masks for the different areas of the face, including the eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, mouth, and face. Now these masks are ready to use with other After Effects effects and adjustments.
What Can You Do With Facial Masks?
This is where the facial spline workflow gets interesting. Once Beauty Box has generated the masks, you can use them as a starting point for a wide range of After Effects effects, not just for traditional skin retouching. Try using them to:
Adjust Lip Color
Want to change the color of a lipstick after the shoot?
Create an Adjustment Layer above your footage and copy the Lips mask onto it. Add Lumetri Color to the same Adjustment Layer and use the mask to target the lips without affecting the rest of the image.
You can adjust hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, color wheels, and other Lumetri settings while the mask follows the subject throughout the shot.
If needed, you can also adjust the mask’s feathering and expansion to make the effect blend naturally.
Change Eye Color
The individual eye masks can also be used for creative color adjustments.
Create an Adjustment Layer and copy the Left Eye and Right Eye masks onto it. Add After Effects’ Change Color effect and use the eyedropper to select the iris color.
From there, adjust the effect settings to create a completely different eye color.
You can also fine-tune the eye masks with feathering and expansion or reduce the effect opacity for a more subtle result.
Reduce Redness and Correct Lighting
Facial masks can also be useful for correcting common lighting and color issues.
The nose mask, for example, could be used to reduce redness or control a distracting highlight. The face mask can be used for broader adjustments, such as correcting exposure or color on the subject without making the same adjustment to the background.
Add Sharpening or Other Effects
The masks aren’t limited to color adjustments. You can use them as a starting point for sharpening, blurring, glow, exposure adjustments, or other After Effects effects.
For example, you could apply subtle sharpening to the eyes and lips while keeping the skin softer. Or you could apply a creative effect to only the eyes or lips without affecting the rest of the frame.
Customize the Results in After Effects
One of the biggest benefits of exporting the masks to After Effects is the additional control it gives editors.
The masks are editable After Effects masks, so you can fine-tune them to fit your shot. Adjust the feather, expansion, opacity, or other mask properties to get the result you want. This gives you the speed of AI-powered facial detection while retaining the control and flexibility of the After Effects workflow.
Beauty Box does the tedious tracking work. After Effects gives you the freedom to decide what happens next.
Built for the Way Editors Already Work
The new facial spline capabilities in Beauty Box 6.5 are designed to give After Effects editors a faster starting point for working with individual facial features.
Whether you’re doing beauty retouching, color correction, or creative compositing, Beauty Box can eliminate some of the repetitive masking work while giving you more control over individual facial features.
And these are just some of the ways you can use the new facial spline capabilities. We’re looking forward to seeing how editors use them in their own projects!
If you haven’t tried Beauty Box for yourself yet, you can download a free demo from our Downloads page.
Got questions or found another creative use for facial masks? Email us at cs@digitalanarchy.com.
