Motion retouching across multiple Makeup By Mario campaigns through Cosmic Pixels studio. Stabilizing, cleaning up, and color correcting the provided footage to get it ready for approval from Mario. In beauty, the color is the product.
The Work
Worked with Cosmic Pixels studio on motion retouching for Makeup By Mario — one of the most recognized names in beauty. The role involved stabilizing, cleaning up, and color correcting the provided campaign footage to get it ready for approval from Mario. When a lipstick shade is off by even a few degrees on screen, it misrepresents the product. In cosmetics marketing, color accuracy is everything.
Across SoftSculpt, Ultra Suede, Four-Play Eye Quads, and Nudes — each campaign had its own color language and its own challenges. Sculpting shades that need to read across multiple skin tones. Matte lip finishes that cameras flatten. Eyeshadow quads where four distinct pigments sit millimeters apart. Every frame required precision isolation and correction to get the product to look the way it looks in person.
Process
01 — Rotoscoping
Frame-by-frame isolation of product areas using After Effects roto brush and manual masking. Cosmetics in motion — lips, skin, eyes — don't hold still. The masks need to track the organic movement of the face and body while maintaining clean edges around the product zone. Every mask is hand-refined to avoid color bleed into surrounding skin tones.
02 — Color Isolation
Once isolated, the product area is corrected at the channel level — adjusting hue, saturation, and luminance independently to match the physical swatch. Cameras introduce their own color science: warm lighting shifts reds toward orange, cool lighting pushes pinks toward mauve. The correction reverses what the camera did and restores the intended color.
03 — Skin Tone Matching
Product color doesn't exist in isolation — it sits on skin. Correcting a lip color without considering the surrounding skin tone produces results that technically match the swatch but look wrong in context. The correction accounts for the interaction between product pigment and skin, preserving the natural relationship while pushing the product toward accuracy.
04 — Final QC
Every corrected frame is reviewed against the physical product reference. Playback at full speed to check for flicker, color drift, or mask artifacts. The correction should be invisible — the audience should never notice retouching happened. They should just see a product that looks exactly the way it's supposed to look.
