Back for another Final Cut Friday. I'll show you how to go from rough skin to smooth, professional-looking skin with no plugins, just tools already built into Final Cut Pro.
The technique
Go to your effects tab, click Blur, and drag a Gaussian Blur onto your clip. Set the amount to 0 for now. Hit the mask button and choose Add Color Mask. Click view mask, then use the dropper to drag across your talent's skin to make a selection, and fine-tune it with the parameters below until you've isolated just the skin. (If you've never used the color mask, check out my skin tones video for a deeper walkthrough.)
Dial it in
Click view mask again to get back to your image, then bring the blur amount up, generally just a couple of points will do it. Don't overdo it, or it starts to look fake. That's the whole thing. This is super handy for corporate shoots, wedding films, and documentaries, basically anytime you want to give your subject a little post-production makeup.
Edit faster with my custom shortcuts
Grab my free Final Cut Pro keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet. It's the exact custom setup I use to edit every video, and it'll shave time off every session.
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