The Skin Smoothing Plugin Final Cut Pro Was Missing

You guys have been asking for this one for a long time, and I finally went ahead and built it. It is a skin smoothing plugin that doesn't just do some trashy blur over top of skin. It actually intelligently smooths skin, so it removes the blemishes but it keeps the pores. Your skin still looks like skin, which is what you want.

It's called PoreFect. And yes, I called it PoreFect because I love my puns. Here's a walkthrough of every control in it, so you know what you're actually adjusting.

Install it, then press one button

Once you install PoreFect it shows up in your effects browser, and you can just double click to apply it to your shot. I wanted to make this as simple as possible, so all you've got to do next is press one button: Detect Skin.

That does quite a lot already. Something else worth noting is that your timeline still plays back smooth, which is not a given with this kind of effect.

Texture smoothing

Texture smoothing softens the fine detail band in your skin. So it calms down the harsh or heavy textures and the different bumps in your skin, without touching everything else in the frame.

Tone and shine smoothing

This one removes some of the shine and then evens out the tone of your skin. Swing it to the far left and you're basically looking at the original. Bring it up and you'll notice it evens out the face quite a bit.

Preserve detail (your airbrush insurance)

Preserve detail adds some of those micro details back into the skin. It isn't bringing the bumpy texture back up a bunch, it's adding micro grain and pore detail that you can see a bit better.

This is basically your insurance against a really airbrushed look. If you're really cranking the smoothing to even someone out, add some of this fine detail back in and you get a much more natural skin texture.

Contrast enhance

Pretty much what it says: it adds contrast back into the skin. Smoothing anything tends to flatten it a little, so this is there to give it back.

Built-in skin tone color correction

I also added a color correction section, for when your subject's skin is sitting off the skin tone line. In the video, my subject's skin is actually okay, it's just leaning slightly towards yellow. So you can hop into the color correction section, adjust the hue to get it more centered on the skin tone line, and increase saturation. Same with the luma, or brightness, slider.

If the skin tone line is new to you, I've got a whole tutorial on reading your scopes properly that will make this section make a lot more sense.

Sharpening that actually targets the face

There's a sharpening section too, and this is not your standard sharpening. The default sharpen in Final Cut Pro is garbage. Real, real bad. It grabs the whole image and grossly sharpens all of it.

What this does instead is sharpen the fine details of the face. You can watch it working on eyebrows and eyelashes rather than the entire frame. It's easy to overdo, so I usually dial it back from wherever I first land.

The selection slider underneath it is your threshold. Slide it up and you're choosing what counts as the sharpest detail, so you can narrow the sharpening down to just the parts you actually want crisp.

Before and after, on more than one face

Here's before PoreFect, and here's after. Quite a huge difference. And if you watched my video on the free way to smooth skin in Final Cut Pro using blur, this is infinitely better.

I also ran it on someone with a darker complexion in the video, and the workflow is identical: apply PoreFect, press Detect Skin, then dial it in how you'd like.

When a shot fights you

Some shots are going to give the mask trouble. Mixed lighting, RGB lighting, that sort of thing. For those I've made full videos showing how to use the advanced selection section to fine-tune the mask, and they live on the PoreFect tutorials and support page.

It plays nicely with Auto Masks

Last thing worth pointing out: PoreFect works flawlessly with Final Cut Pro's Auto Masks. They complement each other and work together really well, so if you're already using auto masks to isolate a person, nothing here fights that. If you haven't dug into them yet, here's the honest breakdown of what Auto Masks do well and where they fall apart.

The honest version

This plugin does about 80% of what the leading $200 skin smoothing plugin does, at a fraction of the price, with no subscription. If you need that last 20%, go buy the expensive one, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But if you've been looking at a $200 price tag for something you use on a handful of talking head shots, this gets you most of the way there.

And only get it if you'll actually use it. If you shoot mostly landscapes and b-roll, skip it. Thanks so much for watching, let me know if you have questions, and have a great day.