Gently and Selectively Smooth Skin and Sharpen Details

Softbox lets you target parts of the image by their tones or by their texture. This allows you to smooth midtone areas while sharpening shadows, or smooth areas with moderate texture while preserving fine details. By default, results look natural, but you can turn the settings up if you want a strong “beauty filter” effect.

This is not a simple Gaussian Blur, and you have full control over the strength of the effects. Under the surface, Softbox uses Selective Clarity and Frequency Separation, as well as dedicated detail enhancement and blemish smooth algorithms.

Smooth Tones and Sharpen Tones use Selective Clarity. This allows tonal ranges in the image to be treated differently, each offering independent Texture and Clarity slider. It's similar to the controls offered in Pixelmator Pro, and goes beyond what’s included in Photoshop or Lightroom.

Smooth Textures and Sharpen Textures use Frequency Separation. This algorithm, used in high-end retouching, recognizes areas by how much detail they include, allowing you to smooth parts of people’s skin far more selectively and naturally. Smooth Blemishes recognizes small spots and pimples to target them alone, and can be used independently or with one of the other smoothing effects.

Sharpen Details is a sharpening algorithm with detail awareness that avoids introducing haloing artifacts. You can use this for final finishing, to re-sharpen a clip you’ve smoothed, or potentially rescue a shot that’s just out of focus.

By default, Softbox affects the entire image, and if you’re planning to smooth skin, we recommend using Final Cut Pro’s new Auto Mask functionality set to Skin, for smoothing, or Skin (Inverted) for most kinds of sharpening . There’s no need to track, and though Auto Mask does increase processing time, it gives excellent results.