While at MacWorld/iWorld in April, I had the opportunity to catch up with the team at Reallusion. They were showing their new FaceFilter 3.0 for Mac. The program allows us average humans to do a lot of the same touchups on portraits that a PhotoShop expert would spend hours doing. To say it is simple is to understate how easy and powerful it is.
Let’s walk thru a simple example of it… Using a picture I just took with the Mac’s PhotoBooth application. Here’s the basic picture… I used a light behind my MacBook Pro in order to off set the very bad lighting in my office.
After you pic the file to import you are presented with two views of the picture, a before and after:
The first step that you need to do, just like Reallusion’s Crazy Talk application, is to map certain facial features – this is called “Fitting”. This includes the tilt of the head,
each eye and eyebrow,
the shape of the nose,
the mouth (don’t forget to toggle the close mouth check box or you won’t be able to whiten the teeth)
and the contour of the face.
The application will try to auto identify these items (as you can see in the before images above), but you can tweak it as much as you’d like (the second image is my mapping). I realized how powerful this was overtime, when I saw that it allowed you to deal with profiles and other angles.
Once we have all of this mapped the real fun beings, we can now do the makeover. FaceFilter by default will offer a quick makeover template.. And as we can see here… It’s not too bad. Already you can see it has gotten rid of some of the blemishes on my forehead. My skin is not as oily/shiny as it was in the original picture. My eyes are highlighted, with a nice twinkle in my eyes, and I have eyelashes.
We can tweak each aspect of the foundation, facial makeup and eye makeup. Let’s have some fun by trying that now. You can see some of the settings on the right hand side of this picture, but let’s talk about the clean: I whitened my teeth, changed my eye color, changed my lips, and worked on overall skin tone.
After working makeup, we can work on the shape of the face with the reshape options. The quickest weight loss program I have ever taken. As you can see in the image, the rest of the image looks fine.. Even though we have reduced both the width of my head and the proportion.
Finally you can add effects to the picture to really make it pop. Overall not a bad job with just a few minutes of playing around (total time 5 minutes). You can spend much more time and really enhance the picture, and Reallusion offers additional brushes and filters to have an even more professional quality of the pictures. I highly recommend you try out the trial version from the appstore. If you like it, I think the Pro version offers a lot of extra capabilities, and is really worth the extra few dollars. Check it out and let me know what you think. And thank you to John and Bill from Reallusion for providing me with a copy to play with.
