I'm trying to isolate skin with a secondary layer and am successful. I want to blur the skin to reduce blemishes but when doing so the blur and degrain sliders don't seem to have an effect. Can I apply a gaussian blur fx on just that secondary? Can't see

Question

I'm trying to isolate skin with a secondary layer and am successful.  I want to blur the skin to reduce blemishes but when doing so the blur and degrain sliders don't seem to have an effect. Can I apply a gaussian blur fx on just that secondary? Can't seem to figure this out.  Is there a better way to smooth skin?

Answer 1

Here's an Adobe help page for isolating skin with suggestion on the use of the blur slider also:
https://helpx.adobe.com/speedgrade/using/apply-secondary-color-corrections.html
And here's one of the original creators of Iridas/SpeedGrade, Patrick Palmer, a six minute vid-tut on using secondaries (specifically in CS6 but this hasn't changed):
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-speedgrade-cs6/secondary-color-correction-in-speedgrade-cs 6/
I'd note, the "blur" and "denoise" tools on the Secondary tab are more about smoothing the keying of the secondary ... they apply a bit of blur or de-noising to make the secondary smoother and cover over the odd pixel or three or four that don't "fit" the key of the secondary in the middle of something you're aiming for.
In current SpeedGrade, I'd try using the Guassian Blur (Range) effect, and sample a good range of the skin tones.
And a lot of people use Red Giant's "Cosmo" plug-in over in AfterEffects or Premiere Pro ... it's a tool designed specifically for working skin tones, dealing with blemishes, wrinkles, spots, and such.
Neil