Motion retouching for Makeup By Mario campaigns through Cosmic Pixels studio, stabilizing, cleaning up and color correcting footage for Mario's approval, because in beauty the color is the product.
The Work
A lipstick shade off by a few degrees on screen misrepresents the product, so each campaign's footage was stabilized, cleaned up and color corrected until Mario could approve it.
SoftSculpt, Ultra Suede, Four-Play Eye Quads and Nudes each had their own color problems: sculpting shades that must read across skin tones, matte lips that cameras flatten, quads with four pigments millimeters apart. Every frame needed isolation and correction to match the product in person.
Process
01 Rotoscoping
Frame-by-frame isolation of the product with After Effects roto brush and manual masking. Lips, skin and eyes don't hold still, so every mask is hand-refined to track the face with clean edges and no color bleed into surrounding skin.
02 Color Isolation
The isolated area is corrected at the channel level, hue, saturation and luminance each matched to the physical swatch. Warm light shifts reds toward orange and cool light pushes pinks toward mauve; the correction reverses what the camera did.
03 Skin Tone Matching
Product color sits on skin. A lip corrected without the surrounding tone can match the swatch and still look wrong, so the correction keeps the relationship between pigment and skin while pushing the product toward accuracy.
04 Final QC
Every corrected frame is checked against the physical product, then played at full speed for flicker, color drift or mask artifacts. The retouch should be invisible.
