Facetune Video is Facetune, but for video.
If you aren't familiar with the Facetune app that just means that your desire to take endless selfies of yourself and lightly touch them up in a piece of editing software before uploading them has likely never truly existed. Facetune is the top selfie-editing app in both Google and Apple app stores, making a clear statement about the culture of self we've all been lured into with our smart phones.
Leaving deep social psychology and philosophy locked in the basement, let's just focus on the app. Today Lightricks (the company that built Facetune) is launching Facetune Video on Apple iOS. It's Facetune, but video. It's your face, but the editing tools apply to video now, allowing the user to edit one frame at a time (the app will then apply changes throughout to match), edit while the video plays and compare before and after results while editing. This isn't the silly AR playground of TikTok or Snapchat, this is retouching video without paying for software or you know, actually learning how to edit video in a professional piece of software.
Frankly, it’s all a bit mad. Here’s an app where you can edit your appearance before sharing it with the world. From facial retouching (skin smoothing, teeth whitening, face reshaping, eye color change, makeup, conceal, glow, matter), tools for general editing (brightness, contrast and so on) and special effects and a healing tool that wipes away blemishes, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Facetune does exactly what it promises to do — alters your personal reality. Are you really the you that you see in your smart phone camera? Yet, this blue pill aside, the technology behind it cannot be ignored.
Facetune Video uses facial feature detection and deep neural network technology paired with geometry analysis and algorithms to create a seamless video editing experience that feels like you are editing one single photo. In a sense, this is an AI-powered editing tool (the deep-learning bit) for selfies. If anything in indicative of what society has become then it's our obsession with our faces on our phones but we're not digging any further into that today (nor the psychological impact).
Facetune Video, while still focused on our egotistical nature, highlights some solid mobile technology advances. Past the neural network and geometry, Facetune Video allows for instantaneous (assuming you aren't slogging on 3G somewhere) results in real time without communicating with the cloud or waiting for files to render. It also uses facial feature detection and 3D face modeling AI to capture every little curve, dent, scar and wrinkle you are going to smooth out with the app anyway. This is an extremely complicated video editing tool in its programming, but terribly simple for users to alter reality.
This isn't some cheeky video app from some silly little cadre of developers. Lightricks isn't messing about.
Facetune and Facetune Video are marketable gateway apps into Lightricks’ full suite of creative products that are backed with the weight of years of cutting-edge academic research, technology, and design. Enlight Quickshot is a mobile photo editing tool (for things that aren't selfies). Photofox enables you to turn your photos into works of art. Videoleap is a video editor and Pixaloop uses AI to bring movement to photos. Lightricks also recently launched Quickart, a lite version of Photofox as an entry into this enhanced mobile suite of editing tools.
Facetune Video is available now on Apple iOS only, though likely coming soon to an Android phone near you.
