How do I make my own zoom filter

[wickham]

I've looked at the range of snap camera filters for zoom but I don't like most of them and I want to make my own.
Can snap camera or any other app do this?

Unconnected with the above request, last night I was in a zoom call with my nieces and held up a photo of an archaeological dig of a skull to the camera and the eyebrows filter jiggled around on it, which was rather funny. I didn't expect the filter to pick up from a photo on a piece of paper.

[servodude]

I've looked at the range of snap camera filters for zoom but I don't like most of them and I want to make my own.
Can snap camera or any other app do this?

Unconnected with the above request, last night I was in a zoom call with my nieces and held up a photo of an archaeological dig of a skull to the camera and the eyebrows filter jiggled around on it, which was rather funny. I didn't expect the filter to pick up from a photo on a piece of paper.

Can't help with the first bit...

But you can have loads of fun with the second bit once you realize that it's all interpreted as "flat"
- things like "face swapping" take on a whole new appeal when you can do it with a sepia pic of your gt-gt- grandfather (then send it to your mum as her birthday card!)

-sd

[wickham]

This turned out to be more difficult than I expected.

First of all, I downloaded and installed Lens Studio which has extremely complicated settings to make a lens filter from the photo source.

Then I downloaded and installed snapcamera to use with Lens Studio. It took me two days to get a partial lens of a face over my face which YouTube videos accomplish in about three clicks as I got well and truly bogged down in the menu system.
Tutorials said create a photo with the background transparent. I tried a gif but that didn't want to be uploaded in Lens Studio. I tried a jpeg but that didn't want to create a transparent background, so I eventually created a png which left the body shoulders, chest and face in colour but the background white transparent.

You can't use snapcamera directly with Zoom, the lens has to be published on snapchat first. I tried to install snapchat on my desktop which got as far as the verification process when it wanted to send a text only to a moblie phone. I don't use a mobile, so I had to find my sister-in-law's old iPhone and charge the battery then use my credit card to get online with pay-as-you-go and then click the verification email to finish my snapchat registration. I could then publish the lens from Lens Studio and after a while it was verified and published in My-Lenses in snapchat on my desktop.

(I later found that I'm still not able to use the snapchat app as I have to download the snapchat app onto a mobile phone, but that means using the Apple App store and that needs an Apple ID which I don't have, and would need me to enter all my personal profile details like date of birth, email address, location etc. which I don't want to do, so I left the snapchat app uninstalled as I can still get the lens details from my snapchat's login page on my desktop.)

Then I tried Zoom which has two options in the video menu, to use the Camera directly or the snapcamera. In snapcamera I had to use search for the name of my lens and show it on the window and Zoom then showed it over my face but it seems you have to be careful to close Lens Studio and open Zoom and Snapcamera in the right order or the camera will say it is being used by another application. All the above took three days with constant confusion and blocks at every stage.

However, although I have achieved a basic lens, there are two settings, one with points all round the lens face which you can adjust to distort the face, or "detect face" which automatically fits the face to your own. I found that the detect face is a bit vague and doesn't really look like the other face as it doesn't include the hair around the other face and my beard shows below which isn't wanted.

The first option shows the lens face inside my face very clearly, complete with the other person's hair and shoulders and top part of the chest but too small, just floating over the middle of my face with a fringe of transparent white with my ears and forehead and chin around it, which also isn't correct. I haven't found a way to increase the size to cover my face completely and cover my hair and beard yet.

It seems that the face mask setting really only affects the face and ignores the hair.