Smooth Skin Express

Smooth Skin Express has been written as a replacement for the original Fast Makeup Artist. It retains the simple controls of the original, but is written to be compatible with Apple Silicon.

Smooth Skin Express defaults to the Final view but you can switch to Selection to see the skin selected and adjust the controls until you get the results you’re looking for, then return View to Final to adjust the level of smoothing and detail retention. The goal should be to achieve adequate skin smoothing while avoiding an over-smoothed “plastic-y” look.

Final/Selection

Final/Selection

Smooth Skin Express generates a mask based on standard skintones. This mask is used to determine where smoothing occurs. You can adjust the mask to suit your situation. You may alter the mask density and falloff. Smooth Skin Express contains an Advanced section for blocking unwanted smoothing with a Cutout Mask for when its high-speed skin selection routines mistakenly pick up areas of your image you do not want smoothed such as hair or lips or items in the background.

Standard selection/Selection with Cutout

Standard selection/Selection with Cutout

Because Smooth Skin Express algorithmically selects standard skintones, if you are planning on adding a stylized “look” to your material, it is best to add the Smooth Skin Express plugin first, before anything that may alter the skintones. However, if skin- tones are “off” due to LOG footage or localized lighting conditions, it would be better to correct for that prior to adding Smooth Skin Express.

Compatibility

Smooth Skin Express is compatible with Final Cut Pro, Motion, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Parameters

Presets

Presets contain a snapshot of your effect configuration. While no built-in presets are available through this parameter, you can still save and load your own preset files.

When you save parameter configuration to a file on disk, this file can later be loaded to recreate the same effect configuration. Presets generated in one video application can be used by the same plug-in running in a different video application.

How do I use the presets popup menu?
Store your commonly used presets here.

View

The following options are available:

Mask Strentth

Set to 60% by default.

Controls the thickness or Strength of the mask. Used in conjunction with Mask Threshold to limit smoothing to appropriate skin regions.

Mask Threshold

Set to 25% by default.

Controls the falloff or Threshold of the mask. Used in conjunction with Mask Strength to limit smoothing to appropriate skin regions.

Smooth

Set to 25% by default.

Controls the amount of softening. This control attempts to apply a correction factor to maintain consistent behavior across differing resolutions.

Detail

Set to 95% by default.

Controls the amount of detail retained.

Texture reduction or skin smoothing is controlled with a balance between the Smooth and the Detail sliders.

Properly adjusted smoothing.

Properly adjusted smoothing.
Too much Smooth, too little detail / Too much Smooth, too much detail.

Too much Smooth, too little detail / Too much Smooth, too much detail.
If too much detail is removed, the skin can take on an unnatural plastic look. High detail with high smoothing can cause blocky “posterized” artifacts.

Advanced

Cutout mask controls.

Cutout

Off by default.

Enables a Cutout Mask to limit or remove a specific color range that you do not want smoothed such as hair or lips if they are mistakenly selected because they fall within standard skin tones .

Cutout Color

Set to
by default.
Color to remove from processing.

Sensitivity

Set to 50% by default.

How close to the color the tones need to be to be removed from processing.