Photographic retouching is nothing new, and it's as common as the digital technologies used to take the photos themselves. Retouching a video, however, is a bit trickier, and it usually requires more work to make a specific effect blend in with the rest of the image. Foton, Inc, a company from Japan, is working on technology that is achieving simply mind-blowing results with video that look as good as any Photoshopped image. Click through to check out these impressive clips.

This is what Foton had to say about the first video:

We developed special movie retouching techniques that won't damage a detail of material, and don't use "blur skill" for it that is why you feel more real. And also we work on 4K data without compressing 4K into HD. This model already had the natural beauty. However,we could improve it more to perform retouching,free transform, and color correction in the movie.

PetaPixel said this about the video:

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.

This sort of manipulation is commonly done on movies and TV shows, but it usually takes a tremendous amount of time and work to do something like this on this sort of scale, and make it blend in perfectly. It's not often that you need to actually do this much to a video image, but if you could, and it could be done rather quickly and efficiently, why wouldn't you?

Here are a few more of their videos:

The other videos don't seem to be embeddable at the moment, but you can check out the rest on Foton's Vimeo page. You might be thinking that this isn't all impressive or that they do this all the time on movies, but most effects are not done at 4K, as the cost is just too great. It also seems that the technology they have can be made to work with lower resolutions, but I'm sure they have a custom tracker that works a lot better when there is more information and more detail.

The real test for this sort of thing will be to see it with a lot of motion. It's likely the tracker will have a difficult time if the scene changes drastically, but since we don't have any examples of that, we can't be sure. Can you do something like this in After Effects? Probably, but the amount of detail that is retained after retouching is impressive, and the retouches are blended seamlessly in a pretty impressive way.

What do you guys think? If the technology needs the extra pixels, does this make the case for 4K video? Have you done any retouching like this in your own work?

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[via Gizmodo & PetaPixel & Fstoppers]