Beauty Box 6.5 Finds Teeth So You Don’t Have To

For those who don’t know the tool: Digital Anarchy develops post-production plug-ins for image repair, retouching and editorial work. Beauty Box Video handles automated skin retouching inside Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer.

There is also a useful clue that Beauty Box Whiten has been in development for some time. Digital Anarchy previously discussed AI-based teeth whitening while working on Beauty Box 6.0. The feature now appears in the company’s 6.5 release material as Beauty Box Whiten, extending the facial analysis to eyes, mouths and teeth. At the time of writing, Digital Anarchy’s public download and support pages still list Beauty Box 6.0, so the 6.5 release details are based on the developer’s supplied announcement rather than an updated public changelog.

Teeth have entered the pipeline

Digital Anarchy is extending Beauty Box Video with Beauty Box Whiten, a new filter designed to identify eyes, mouths and teeth and create masks around them. Editors can use those masks to brighten eye whites or teeth without first drawing and tracking the regions manually. The generated mask remains adjustable, including feathering and growing or shrinking the selected area. This is useful because talent continues to move, teeth continue to meet gums, and automated segmentation continues to live in the real world.

Beauty Box already analyses faces and skin to restrict smoothing, shine reduction and colour adjustments to appropriate areas. Whiten applies the same basic philosophy to facial regions that are very definitely not skin.

New engine, same workstation

Beauty Box 6.5 also introduces a new GPU-enhanced inference engine developed internally for its machine-learning functions. The engine handles model execution for Beauty Box Whiten and Shine Removal. According to the developer, the rewrite improves speed and memory behaviour across different host applications. The release also brings improved face detection when several people appear in a shot. The aim is to keep analysis attached more consistently to the intended subject rather than having the software develop a sudden professional interest in somebody standing behind them.

The cloud can go home

Digital Anarchy says all of the new AI processing runs locally. Footage is not uploaded for analysis and production data is not used to train its models. For facilities working with unreleased material, that is more useful than an AI badge on the box. Mask generation remains on the workstation and does not depend on an external inference service.

Beauty Box documentation lists Windows 10 or later, macOS 10.14 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon support. Digital Anarchy has previously documented Metal, CUDA and OpenCL paths for Beauty Box rendering. So GPU-enhanced means GPU-enhanced. It does not mean we get to pick a backend on the developer’s behalf.

After Effects gets the editable version

After Effects users can convert Beauty Box facial analysis into editable masks. Digital Anarchy already had eye and mouth spline generation for Beauty Box 6.0. The 6.5 release uses those masks now gain improved accuracy and stability. That leaves the artist with ordinary After Effects geometry rather than an untouchable AI result. If the automatic boundary is nearly right, move a few points. No need to thank the neural network or start again from frame one.

Hosts, with the usual footnote called reality

The 6.5 talks to Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Avid. The OpenFX download also mentions Nuke. Current public installers also have different OS requirements depending on the host. Facilities should therefore check the final 6.5 installer against their actual workstation and host version before deployment. Compatibility is much easier when checked before opening the project containing 847 shots.

Still a retouching tool

Beauty Box has not suddenly become an image generator. Its established tools cover skin masking, smoothing, shine reduction and colour correction. The machine-learning layer is being used mainly to decide where those operations should act.

That makes Whiten a fairly practical use of AI. The model finds the region. The plug-in performs the correction. The artist can still decide that the client’s definition of “a tiny bit whiter” has drifted alarmingly during the review.

Licensing remains reassuringly complicated

Digital Anarchy offers perpetual licences and annual subscriptions. Its pricing has perpetual plug-ins between $99 and $199 for one plug-in and one host application. The All Access subscription costs $199 per year and covers the company’s plug-ins across compatible hosts. The Single Host App plan costs $149 per year. The Beauty Box 6.5 release costs $199 for a new licence, $99 for upgrades from version 5.0, and $149 for upgrades from earlier versions.

Beauty Box Video costs $199 for a single host licence. Digital Anarchy is currently offering an All Host Apps upgrade for an additional $49 instead of the stated regular $188, covering Adobe applications, Final Cut Pro, Avid and Resolve/OpenFX on Mac and Windows. Individual additional host licences normally cost $89.

The OpenFX build covers DaVinci Resolve and Nuke, while Digital Anarchy lists Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid and DaVinci Resolve among the principal supported applications. Purchases are delivered electronically, with the serial number sent by email and licence information also available through the account dashboard.

A watermarked demo is available using the same installer as the licensed version, if you want to try it and see whether even AI Whitening of teeth can nudge the “Talent” in your footage toward presentable.

https://digitalanarchy.com/beauty-box-video/