Retouching Video
Generally speaking, I prefer not to use any sort of retouching in my videos. But there are times when the client demands it or in some situations, I want to convey a feeling that will look better if I do some tweakings here and there in the footage. So why not?
Retouching a video is a bit different from retouching a picture. For example, in the video, the only thing we do is telling the software to set the hue at a certain range, and it will take care of the rest. My favorite plugin for retouching is Beauty Box by Digital Anarchy. The plugin is both available for After Effects and Premiere Pro. Anyway, I personally prefer to send my work from Premiere Pro to After Effects when I decide to retouch.
Retouching In After Effects
First, I need to drag and drop Beauty Box onto my footage. The plugin will immediately apply its default settings onto the footage. But if you want to take it to the next level, you should click on Analyze Frame. This will make the plugin detect and analyze the skin tone and then set Dark and Light colors based on it.
White sections are the ones that are affected by the retouching process and the Black sections are the ones that are not Touched. To do the changes, you can set the Mode to Add Color. This will let you change the black sections into white ones based on your liking. Then you can switch off the Mask and see the effect of Beauty Box in action! It really knows how to impress!
Another cool thing you can do is to set the amount of processing you want beauty box to do on the footage, how much you want it to smoothen the face and stuff like that.
As I said at the beginning, you can also have this plugin on Premiere Pro. YES, it is more resource-hungry on Premiere but by choosing GPU processing you can leverage its power and experience a much smoother workflow. But in the end, it all depends on your software preference. Do and use what feels more natural and easy for you.