Grading beauty filtered picture to match non-filtered

robinvarga · January 27, 2016

Hey Graders, hopefully you can help me out with my dilemma. I recently started grading work for a commercial that used a beauty filter for all the setups except one. I believe they used a Tiffen Glimmergas 1/4 filter, with CP2s on a Dragon. I find that the non-filtered image has a "distinct" video feel to it, any suggestions on matching? Cheers!

David Mullen ASC · January 28, 2016

There are Tiffen digital filter plug-ins for some editing software, you could try that.

Otherwise most colorists would do digital diffusion with a overlay of a sharp background layer and either a blurred version of the image, or just a blurred version of the highlights only pulled from a luminance key.

They sometimes will also just try to lower the contrast, lift the blacks, in the faces to soften detail there. That's a bit more subtle than doing digital diffusion.

Satsuki Murashige · January 28, 2016

Here's an example of extreme post diffusion from a web series I shot last year. I'm in the middle of the color grade right now.

This is a basic overlay of a duplicate layer on top of the base layer with gaussian blur applied and layer opacity set to screen. We wanted an extreme effect, so the opacity of the out of focus layer is probably around 40%. Also, since this is a global adjustment you'll notice that the dark areas got lifted as well as the midtones and highlights. If I were to compare how this looks to an optical filter, I would say it is most similar to a Schneider Classic Soft rather than a mist-type filter like a Tiffen Glimmerglass. I think a Glimmerglass would spread the highlights more and not have the glow as localized, and also lower a bit more the contrast overall.