Beauty

Beauty is a Resolve FX Refine effect for portrait retouching. Blackmagic describes Ultra Beauty as a mode designed to smooth general imperfections without simply destroying facial features, then recover texture for a more natural result.

It is not Face Refinement and it is not AI Blemish Removal. Beauty is not a per-feature face reshaper, and a single isolated blemish may be better served by a dedicated cleanup tool. Beauty is strongest when the task is controlled treatment of overall skin texture.

The most important conceptual mistake is treating Beauty as an ordinary Blur. The captured Ultra Beauty Inspector separates Smoothing, Detail Recovery and Texture Recovery: texture is reduced first, then useful structure is brought back through distinct stages.

The captured Resolve 21 Operating Mode menu shows Automatic, Advanced and Ultra Beauty. Those three UI choices are confirmed; do not invent undocumented internal mathematics for each mode beyond the current Blackmagic description and the target UI.

Ultra Beauty is useful for teaching because the captured Inspector exposes explicit Smoothing, Detail Recovery, Texture Recovery and Grain groups. That does not mean every production shot needs all four stages enabled.

Smoothing is the first retouch stage. Strength controls how much correction is applied while Levels changes the character or scale of what is being smoothed. Pushing both upward quickly removes local skin texture and produces a waxy result.

The captured Method menu shows Flatten and Filter. The labels alone are not enough to prove exact mathematical behavior, so compare methods on the same frame, especially at skin-to-hair and skin-to-beard transitions.

The captured Quality menu shows Full, Fast and Fastest. Quality is a different axis from Strength. Compare quality modes with creative settings locked so you can tell whether the processing profile actually improves the shot.

Detail Recovery is the first route for bringing structure back after smoothing. Strength controls contribution, Width changes the characteristic detail scale, Gamma reshapes the response, and Blur softens the recovery signal.

Preview Edges / Details is a diagnostic view of the structures entering the detail path. If the preview is dominated by codec noise, ringing or oversharpened pores, more Detail Recovery will reinforce the wrong information.

Preview Recovery isolates the recovery contribution. It is particularly useful when the final image looks both too soft and unpleasantly sharp at the same time: broad texture may have been smoothed away while only narrow digital detail was restored.

Texture Recovery is a second route for restoring believable skin character. Texture controls amount, Scale controls characteristic size, and Detail / Edge Balance shifts emphasis between surface structure and more edge-like information.

Preview Texture lets you inspect the texture component directly. If the texture map looks synthetic compared with untouched skin, reduce Texture or Scale rather than trying to disguise it with additional Grain.

Grain appears after the recovery groups in the captured Inspector and should be treated as a finishing stage. With Grain Strength at zero, the captured UI visually disables Size, Softness and Saturation, which reinforces the correct workflow order.

Grain should not be used as camouflage for excessive smoothing. It can restore an organic match after a clean retouch, but it cannot recover eyelashes, pores or edge shape that were already destroyed upstream.

Effect Mask is a separate blue mask input for spatial coverage. Use it to keep hair, background, clothing or textured objects outside the retouch. It does not replace the primary Input and it is not a second image/reference input.

On a moving face, coverage quality matters as much as Beauty settings. A soft static Ellipse can look perfect on one still and fail on a head turn, so production masks need appropriate tracking or animation.

Aggressive upstream denoising, sharpening and compression change the information Beauty interprets as texture/detail. Pipeline order matters: Detail Recovery cannot honestly restore signal that no longer exists.

Judge Beauty at two viewing scales. At 100%, inspect pores, lashes, microcontrast, ringing and synthetic grain; at normal viewing size, judge the entire face so pixel-level perfection does not cost facial character and expression.

A still frame is not enough. Review expressions, head turns, hair near the face and changing light. Texture pumping, halos and drifting mask boundaries often reveal themselves in motion long before they are obvious on a selected still.