Floss™ by LVLY

One of the things LVLY is known for is outstanding beauty work. The work has to be flawless and the artist needs complete control over the image. With more digital content being produced, beauty/fashion/luxury brands needed a solution to retouch talent without high price tags. The plug-in options on the market compromised quality for speed or ease of use. As an artist who specializes in beauty retouch, I set out to design a tool without compromise and that retouch artists would love to use.

Floss™ development began with an image processing flowgraph in Autodesk Flame, which was then converted to a GLSL shader. I handed this to our developer, Gary Oberbrunner of Darkstar Systems who wrote a custom image processing algorithm that delivered the same look as my reference GLSL while I worked on UI design. The goal of v1.0 was to make a minimum viable product that delivered the same results regardless of the host app or OS. We developed Floss™ 1.0 as OFX, Adobe and Autodesk Spark plugins for Mac, Windows and Linux. We tested Floss™ 1.0 in-house in Flame, Resolve, After Effects and Premiere. The UI was basic: There were controls over how much “Flossing” was done to the image (amount, threshold, etc) but where the effect was applied was controlled by masking either upstream or downstream from Floss™. Additional steps, like sharpening and restoring highlights and shadows, were applied by the artist downstream.

For v2.0 we focused on incorporating those upstream and downstream steps into the Floss™ plugin. The use of external mattes/masks were still an option, but the user now had the ability to key a color range, restore highlights and apply sharpening within Floss™, making it a more self contained experience.

v3.0 is in the planning stages. All in all, a fantastic first experience in software development. For more information about Floss™ and to see more examples, visit the Floss™ page on the LVLY website.