A Jaw-Dropping Demonstration of Beauty Retouching Done on 4K Video

Beauty retouching on still photographs of faces is both ubiquitous and controversial in some industries. You’ve likely seen your fair share of tutorials and demonstrations that show amazing feats of Photoshop, but did you know that the same ‘shops can be done on video? And not just any video, mind you: 4K video.

A Japanese company called Foton Inc. claims that it has developed a new retouching technique that can be applied to 4K video, without damaging the quality and without having to compress the video first. The above demo of the technology is astonishing.

Foton’s Vimeo page has a number of other videos demonstrating tools it has created that allows edits that bring Photoshop-style edits to the world of super-high-res footage. These tools can be used directly on videos without having to tediously retouch each individual frame they comprise.

It appears that the software is advanced enough to track with subjects’ faces as they moved around the frame, allowing for the edits to be consistent throughout the entire video without any blurring (look at how clear the skin is!). Although the new technique does away with frame-by-frame editing, Foton says it still spent 3-4 days creating the short proof-of-concept clip above.

No word on whether we’ll be able to use these tools on our own computers anytime soon, but it’s crazy to see that we might. Pretty soon we may be hearing familiar cries of “shopped!” in the comment sections of video sites.

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