Best approach to bring back subtle skin texture when it’s barely present?

[Jerem]

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a beauty shot where the client asked me to bring back some fine skin details. The problem is that the original footage has very little texture to begin with, the skin is very bright.

I’ve already tried sharpening and frequency separation which helped a bit but I’m hitting the limit of what’s actually there.

Do you have any tips or favorite techniques in Flame to :

Selectively enhance what little high-frequency detail exists

Or subtly recreate believable skin texture without it looking fake on Moving face with potential motion

Any workflow ideas, Matchbox suggestions or tricks for combining real and synthetic detail would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance !

[bryanb]

In the A2Beauty Matchbox you can choose ‘invert’ and it will enhance details instead of smoothing them. I’ve used this for a ‘before and after’ with a makeup product.

[allklier]

Have you looked at crok-skin and crok-reskin. It exists specifically for this purpose. It procedurally creates matching skin textures you can blend with the existing skin.

[randy]

I’d use Flux Dev Detailer / Enhancer in Comfy with Flux Realism LoRa.

AI is perfect for these situations.

[johnt]

Match grain. It’s ace for this.

LS Lumps is also good.

[allklier]

Austin’s new trick with match grain may have a fun variation.

Use crok skin to create a skin texture, but instead of patching it in the old way, use it as a grain texture via @AustinCampbell’s trick and then paint in the matte where you want to apply this texture. The voronoy pattern in match grain makes it seamless, and you don’t have to worry about the edges of your patch.

[Jerem]

Thanks for all your answers! Curious to try all of this. The client approved the fix with A2Beauty invert, but all these solutions look promising for more complex shots as well.

[BrittCiampa]

@bryanb

In the A2Beauty Matchbox you can choose ‘invert’ and it will enhance details instead of smoothing them. I’ve used this for a ‘before and after’ with a makeup product.

After reading this I used it on a wooden structure to bring out the wood grain texture and it worked so nicely as well. Thanks for the tip @bryanb !!

[allklier]

I’m not as cool as @AustinCampbell with the short YT videos, so you’ll have to put up with screenshots….

Basic stock image from ArtList (RED Raw)

close-up of original skin:

end result with new skin texture on the cheek:

Skin texture created with crok_skin - with full control over the color and pattern

Additional Note Added: This batch works great as a single frame. Since skin texture needs to remain static, you will still need stab/unstab or motion vectors to place the skin for an entire clip.

Batch:

Take crok-skin and make your designer patch. Blur it, and then use a match grain (input, degrained from blur, original from patch) to create a grain data sample.

Standard grain/regrain workflow on the main image, except you pipe in the grain output of the first match grain to the grain input of the second match grain.

Use action to comp with mask, softness, and strength control.

Enjoy your designer skin texture easily applied to faces.

Difference between that and older techniques is that the grain texture is expandable without recognizable seams.

Inverse A2Beauty can bring out detail that’s there but hidden. This workflow can add detail that was never there, or where the original detail is undesirable.

And this should work with other textures too, maybe wood grain, etc. It only changes the texture, not the color.