A recent interviewee got quite an extreme rash on her chest and neck as filming continued. Im rubbish at colour correction, so could really do with some help to remove it, or make it better at least! HELP! :) (thanks)
You can do that easily with Davinci Resolve free edition. Put a mask over the chest area, track it and then use the color picker to select rash. Then use the color wheels to change the color of the rash to skin tone.
There is actually very little movement, so the tracking isn't a big problem. Getting it looking right is going to be the issue. are there freelancers on here that would do this kind of thing?
The original footage is 1920x1080 from a Canon C100.
There are plugins for video software, including Vegas, designed for this type of thing. They smooth complexions, etc. But they tend to be pricey $99-$300 or so.
Please post a few seconds of actual video and see if someone would like to take a crack at it. Audio is not important. You could render 20-30 seconds to Sony AVC/MVC - Blu-ray 1920x1080-nnn, 10 Mbps video stream, place on a cloud share and post the link here.
In a pinch you could try the Secondary Color Corrector on the event on a lower track and a feathered positive mask on the uncorrected event on an upper track.
It's very tricky to get the Secondary Color Corrector mask right, and at moments her skin might look strange in other ways or bleached. The settings I show below are just a very quick effort and could probably be improved upon. Select effect range by selecting a rectangle from the most saturated part of the rash.
Also you'll probably have a lot of work animating the mask on the upper track, assuming she's moving around a bit. Keep the number of anchor points to a minimum to make your life easier.
Happy to try this on a video sample if you share one.
BCC10 Beauty Studio is really good, especially since it has Mocha masking inbuilt. This is the result I got earlier today, though I think I was a little more aggressive on smoothing:
Is anybody listening to Nick Hope? He offered the right tool for it: Secondary Color Correction. Just create a mask based on the color of the rash, feather it as necessary, then set its hue, saturation and intensity to match the rest of her skin.
That said, you really need to watch for such things while shooting the video. A little makeup would have solved this problem before it became a problem.
Yes, Nick did an excellent color correcting. But until you see the video you can't determine how much manual tracking and screwing around would have to be done.
Dexcon, Her chest looks very unnaturally blurred in that image and the redness isn't remove at all. Doesn't BCC Studio color correct?
Yes, John222, there is a lot of blurring, which is why I noted in my post that I thought the smoothing (blurring) was a bit too aggressive. In the end, I guess it would be the editor's/producer's/client's decision about how much rash is evident against the trade-off visual effect in obscuring it.
BCC10 Beauty Studio does have color correction, but it's a global correction (i.e. not secondary) that affects all colors within the mask. So pulling back the saturation on the rash also reduces the saturation in the rest of the skin. There are other color correction plugins in BCC10 that might help, but I didn't give those a try.
>>Select effect range by selecting a rectangle from the most saturated part of the rash.
How do you select a rectangle in Secondary Color Corrector?
Oops, I don't think you can. I got confused because the rectangular marquee in some FX was not working in many versions of Vegas until a very recent build of VP14. Looks like you can only select from one point. You can select a rectangle in the "Choose Complementary Color" and "Choose Adjustment Color" tools in that FX, so I see no reason why it can't be added to "Select effect range" as well. Also, I really wish the colour you have selected is shown in a little box and perhaps as an RGB value too. Would be pretty easy to code that and there's plenty of screen real estate for it.
Come on magicmat, share a bit of footage for us to try! I'd happily send you back a .veg project that, with luck, you'd just need to add animation keyframes to.
Well arent you all incredibly helpful?! Thanks so much for all these suggestions and comments. I have had a bit of a play as per Nicks suggestions. Im not great at grading, I dont really know what im doing but I had a little success. Here is the AVC file though: https://www.dropbox.com/s/06j5m3f1j1gyw3y/Rash%20Test.avc?dl=0
Here you go. VP14 project. If you're using an older version then you can save it to an older format with this. I changed strategy slightly and just did a positive mask on the top track as I didn't want her arms affected. I just did the fix for the part at 38 to 52 seconds (between the markers) and I didn't even need to animate the mask.
Ideally, after this correction I think you'd apply a softening/blur effect to her chest based on a luminance mask so the dress wasn't affected but I couldn't work out how to do that without rendering an intermediate as my brain starts to melt when parents, children and compositing modes get involved. Someone who does more compositing than me should be able to.
I rendered those 14 seconds to an AVC MP4 and could upload the result to the forum tomorrow but currently my <1Mbps upload bandwidth is full of something else so it's failing.