Masking

Why mask?

Without a mask, FaceTweak may change anything in the face area, and it gently reshapes the pixels around it so the change blends in. Usually that’s what you want. A mask narrows it down. For example, you can fix only the mouth for lip-sync and leave the eyes exactly as they were filmed, or stop an eyeline fix from bending the frame of someone’s glasses.

Masking lives in Advanced › Masking. Both sections start closed, and Mask starts at Off, so nothing changes until you choose a mask.

Choosing a mask

MaskOff · Whole Face · Custom Regions · default Off

• Off: no mask. FaceTweak works as described in the earlier guides.
• Whole Face: changes stay inside a face-shaped outline that follows the actor’s features. Outside it, the hair, neck and background stay exactly as filmed.
• Custom Regions: you decide, area by area, what may change and what must stay untouched.

Face regionsCustom Regions · each Off, Edit or Protect

With Custom Regions, eight areas appear, each with its own setting: Eye - Screen Left, Eye - Screen Right, Eyebrows, Nose, Mouth, Cheeks, Jaw / Chin and Forehead. Mouth starts at Edit, and everything else starts at Off.

“Screen left” is the eye on the left of your screen, which is the actor’s own right eye.

Shaping the mask

Expand / Contract (%)−50 to 50 · default 0

Grows the mask (positive values) or shrinks it (negative values). The amount is a percentage of the face’s width, so the same setting suits a wide shot and a close-up. Big pose changes may need a bigger mask to avoid clipping the edge of the change.

Feather (%)0 to 25 · default 3

Softens the mask’s edge, working inward from the boundary. Outside the mask, pixels stay exactly original, so feathering never leaves a faint halo around the face.

Show Mask OverlayOn or off · default off

Tints the area FaceTweak may change green, so you can see the mask over your footage, even before you’ve changed a slider.

Expand / Contract and Feather can be keyframed, for example to open the mask out during a moment where the head turns more.

The mask follows the face

Regions are found from the actor’s features on every frame, so they move with the face. An Edit region covers both where a feature is in your footage and where your edit moves it. If a smile widens and lifts the mouth, the whole new mouth is inside the mask, and the old mouth is fully replaced. Protect regions stay on the real, filmed feature.

While you drag a slider, the quick preview uses the feature positions from your footage. The mask catches up with the edit when the frame settles.

Recipes

Lip-sync only

1. Set Mask to Custom Regions. Mouth is already on Edit.
2. Leave every other region Off.
3. If the jaw opens noticeably, set Jaw / Chin to Edit too, so the chin can move with the mouth.

Eyeline only

1. Set Mask to Custom Regions, set both eyes to Edit and set Mouth to Off.
2. If the eyelids look clipped at the edge, raise Expand / Contract a few percent.

Change everything except one area

1. Set Mask to Custom Regions and set every region to Edit.
2. Set the area you want to keep, for example a nose with a piercing or a forehead under a fringe, to Protect.

Outputting only the masked area

This is for compositing: when you’d rather layer FaceTweak’s result over the original yourself, for example in Fusion.

Mask OutputFull Frame · Masked Region (Alpha) · default Full Frame

Full Frame gives you the whole picture with the edit in place, as usual. Masked Region (Alpha) gives you only the masked area, with everything else transparent. Layered over its own original footage, it looks exactly like the Full Frame result, soft edge included.

• Expand / Contract and Feather shape the transparent edge. Protect regions are transparent.
• Mix still applies inside the mask.
• Frames where no face is found come out fully transparent.
• This control appears once Mask is set to something other than Off.

For example, to output only the lips: set Mask to Custom Regions with only Mouth on Edit, set Mask Output to Masked Region (Alpha), and add a little Feather for a smooth edge. On big close-ups, a Feather of at least 0.5% keeps the edge smooth.