ANR Beauty

Overview

Beauty treats skin at three scales, so a face never turns plastic. Blemish Repair reduces small isolated bright, dark and discoloured spots, Skin Smoothing softens uneven medium-scale shading, and Texture Retention keeps the skin's original fine texture on top.

Local Redness Reduction reduces excess red compared with the skin around it, with no fixed target colour: it is not a global desaturation. Color Evenness optionally smooths broader colour variation. Feature Protection protects strong local edges automatically; for exact control over freckles, lashes, brows, lips or facial hair, connect a roto or matte to Protect.

With Selection on Automatic Skin, a broad colour qualifier picks the skin tones to treat. It does not detect faces: use Mask for exact isolation, or Sampled Color under unusual lighting. Switch View to Skin Selection, Blemish Map or Removed Detail at any time to see what is selected, which spots are repaired and what was taken away.

Inputs

1. Sourcerequired

   The plate or element to retouch, in scene-linear RGB.

2. Maskoptional

   Selects where the retouch applies, by its alpha: white applies the full effect, black keeps the original Source. With Selection on Mask Only / All Colors, every colour inside it is treated.

3. Protectoptional

   Holds areas out of the retouch, by its alpha: white keeps the original pixels (freckles, lashes, brows, lips or facial hair you want to keep), black allows the treatment. It always subtracts from the selection.

Output. The retouched Source with its alpha unchanged. View can instead show the Skin Selection or the Blemish Map as grayscale previews, or Removed Detail.

Quick start

1. Add ANR Beauty to the plate before film grain and final grading.
2. Set View to Skin Selection and adjust Skin Tolerance until the skin is white and the background or clothing stays dark. If the skin falls outside the automatic range, switch Selection to Sampled Color and pick clean skin with Skin Color.
3. Switch View to Blemish Map: the brighter a spot, the more it is repaired. Set Blemish Size to the radius of the spots in pixels, so the sample ring reaches the clean skin around them, then adjust Blemish Repair and Blemish Sensitivity.
4. Switch View back to Beauty. Adjust Skin Smoothing and Smoothing Size to calm uneven shading, keeping Texture Retention at 1 so the pores stay natural.
5. If a spot keeps a whitehead or bump texture, raise Spot Detail Cleanup. Use Local Redness Reduction and Color Evenness to settle blotchy colour.
6. Check View: Removed Detail: only spots and blotches should show there, not eyes, lashes or pores. If a feature shows, protect it with Protect.

The panel

The node's panel as Nuke shows it, with the values of a new node. Click any control to see what it does; tabs and sections work as in Nuke.

All controls

Tips

• Texture Size is the radius that separates pore-scale texture from skin shading: use smaller values on wide shots, where the pores are smaller in the frame.
• Keep Spot Detail Cleanup at 0 to keep fine detail even inside repaired spots; raise it when a pimple's own bump texture should go too.
• When wardrobe or background is close to the skin tone, lower Skin Tolerance, switch Selection to Sampled Color, or connect a rough garbage roto to Mask.
• Quality sets the resolution of the analysis only (Fast a quarter, Balanced half, High full); the original texture always stays full resolution. Use High for tiny blemishes, fine grain and final close-ups.

Good to know

• Skin Selection, Blemish Map and Removed Detail replace the picture: switch View back to Beauty before rendering.
• Place Beauty before ANR Film Grain (or work on a degrained plate and regrain after), so heavy grain is not taken for pore texture.
• Each frame is treated on its own, with no random texture and no history from other frames: play the shot back to check the retouch holds steady.
• Size controls are in full-resolution pixels and follow proxy scale and pixel aspect.
• The Source alpha passes through unchanged, in every View.
• Runs on the CPU: no GPU and no AI model needed.

Works with

ANR Film GrainAdds film-like grain that follows the image's brightness, to match CG, paint fixes and clean comps to grainy footage.ANR DiffusionSoftens and blooms highlights like a diffusion filter on the lens, while texture and deep blacks stay intact.ANR Light MatchKeeps a comped element's light in step with the plate: when the wall behind it brightens, darkens or flickers, the element changes the same way.ANR AI Upscaler - MatcherBrings a low-resolution image up to plate size with an AI upscaler, then lines it up with the original plate and matches its colour.