3 EASY Steps to get PERFECT Skin Tones | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

[Music] what's going on guys this is qazi welcome to another amazing tutorial yes you guys have been asking for it for months and it's finally happening three steps to get perfect skin tones not good enough not great but perfect skin tones in davinci resolve and i wanted to make it challenging okay so i didn't use re alexa footage i didn't use red footage we went all the way back we're using sony s-log 8-bit footage it came from a7r3 so this is going to be near impossible when it comes to pulling keys you guys know what i'm talking about it's not going to be easy but that's the fun part about color grading and guys just keep in mind on this channel i'm trying to create taste makers okay so this is going to be a cinematic look we're going to be pushing it we're not going for a conservative let's try to make everything look natural that will just never happen on this channel think about movies like drive joker john wick parasite i mean these skin tones are crazy they're really really pushed but that's what we remember from these films and this is what we want to learn how to create i am so excited to make that announcement just dropped a brand new one-hour long free training that's going to teach you 10 tips to grade 10 times faster in davinci resolve guys this is genuinely over 10 years worth of experience that i just like poured into one hour long training absolutely free you do not want to miss it link is in the description and on that note if you're enjoying the content smash that like button subscribe to my channel for more awesomeness do not forget to follow me on instagram i'm dropping value bombs there every single day let's roll the intro let's get this show on the road and guys as always we're not gonna just stop at creating perfect skin tones we're gonna take it a step further so buckle up get ready let's jump right in first node let's just go ahead and name it this is going to be my primaries so i'm going to leave that there let's create another serial and this one i'm going to call saturation and let's leave it there and let's go back to our first node and let's just jump right in okay actually you know what let's go to our saturation first and i'm going to start cranking some saturation in so i'm going to go all the way this footage is shot with sony a7r 3 in s-log so now let me just go to my primaries what i want to do here is i want to start off with i'm looking at my scopes right so what's going on in my scopes what do i got to do so first thing that i'm going to start doing is i'm going to take my offset and i'm going to start moving it around until i get somewhat of a proper balance okay so i'm looking for that so let me just see let's move it around a little bit and where does everything just kind of start to look somewhat normal so for offset it's really good to focus on vector scope and you kind of want to keep this point right in the middle and if you can do that then that means you're getting pretty good to like a neutral spot so if i turn this note on and off you can see that we didn't have to do much but a little goes a long way in color grading everything is about nuance okay now that we are at this stage let's start working on our contrast and pivot so i'm going to start off with contrast and kind of just go for it you know don't be too shy and then pull it back so first go all the way then pull it back so let's keep it somewhere around here we want to have that nice dynamic range that we get with sony s lock footage so this is looking nice now let's go into my pivot and i want to kind of give it a high key look not too much though so let's do some dance between contrast and pivot so let's go up as you go back in your pivot you brighten your image as you go further you darken your image so maybe somewhere around here because understand this one thing guys when you're trying to create good skin tones it's all of it okay it's not like do whatever the hell you want and then just jump in and all of a sudden you're gonna hit one button you're gonna have perfect skin tones you have to build your grade you have to massage your grade to get it to a point where you can have proper skin tone so it's every single step okay you can't you know skip x y and then get to the z and think that everything is going to be perfect so i want you to have that thing drilled into your heads let's turn this on and off we're coming a long way in this node okay in our primaries what else can i do so i'm just looking at it right now let's start stretching our primaries a little bit more so we're looking at our parade and i think i can still or waveform there's still a lot of room down here and up there a little bit too so i'm just going to go in my lift and kind of pull it down and then do that dance where i pull my left down and i pull my gamma up right to let the image breathe in the middle and then take my gain and kind of pull it down something like that to kind of give it that film look right because you got to keep your gain in this world just look at my scopes you got to keep your gain here this is uh this is where things start to look cinematic okay and i'm gonna take my lift i'm gonna pull it down a little bit more i'm gonna take my gamma and pull it up a little bit more just to open up my image and you know you guys know you guys know this dance so now we're in somewhat of like a nice spot this is not bad at all this is a good foundation for us to build off of so this is let's call this our base okay this is our base grade up until this point all right so now i'm gonna do an append node and this one is going to be called my look and basically this is going to be the foundation of my proper skin tones and guys skin tones are all in here okay so the first way now we're jumping into our first process first step first way to getting perfect skin tones it is gamma and mid-tones it's the mix of gamma and mid-tones okay you guys will see what i'm talking about so we're gonna start creating a look but we're gonna build the look around our subject around our skin so just watch what happens now i'm just going for a good skin what does a good skin look like to me so just look at i'm just going for that saturated commercial looking skin that just pops you know so i'm going for that i'm not focusing on anything else right now so if i just do on and off look how big of a difference i made and how good the skin is already looking look right here look right here you know around her chest like look at her face that magenta that weird sony magenta we were able to pull out and we were able to get really good skin tone so far so it's looking really nice and it's adding the right amount of warmth that is very inviting to this image so it's helping in all the ways okay now this is where the dance begins so now i'm going to jump into my log wheels and in my log wheels i'm going to take my mid-tone and i'm going to start going in that direction and just look what's happening it's going to be very subtle but it makes a big difference in the skin okay so now i'm here right and you can exaggerate it let's just try to push it so we can see a little bit more of it like making a you know real difference and let me undo it now okay so now we can start to see it like we can see how saturated the skin is looking now and it's even like kind of seeping into the hair as well so i'm gonna obviously pull it back a little bit because i feel like this is a bit much uh for exaggeration to show you guys it wasn't bad but now i'm kind of going to ease off on it and pull it back so this like look at this note what it's doing so this is what i'm talking about look look at how much separation we've created from the background and the image is already looking so 3d so this is the first step to creating the perfect skin tone now if you're turning and burning if you're working on a corporate video if you're working on a documentary and you have tons of shots and not enough time you can hit the brakes here and just keep moving on okay so just know that that this is very very acceptable and it's a really good skin tone already but this is the first part of the process okay now we're jumping into our second way or second step into building a perfect skin tone so i'm going to create a brand new note and this one i'm going to call hue verses so this is going to be our hue versus options and it's not just going to be the skin that we're going to affect we're going to affect the image around it as well and like i said the answer is always both you got to do all the things to get the perfect skin tone when we watch joker or any of those movies where it just the separation is out of control and everything looks so good it's not because you know jill only worked on the skin and then let everything just be where it was she had to separate the background from the foreground then the skin you know separate the skin and it's all those steps that makes the image as beautiful as it is and that's one concept that i really want you guys to understand that it's all of it it's not just one thing so now under my hueverses options and what i want to do here is go ahead and select this okay just click on that and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and extend these points so i'm going to go ahead grab this and i'm going to extend it out a little bit and i'm going to do the same thing with this point and kind of extend it out a little bit now i'm going to go in the middle and let's start playing around with this so i'm going to take it up i'm going to bring it down and like what's happening okay so where do i want to park it so i want to park it maybe somewhere around here and let's do on and off so i mean we're barely doing anything but it's taking that magenta out a little bit more which is i don't know if it's actually helping okay so it's taking the magenta out a little bit more and it's giving me what i'm looking for and obviously i'm gonna keep building on it right so i'm not done yet now let's go into our hue versus saturation and we're going to do the same thing let's just grab that part and again we're going to open it up a little bit so i'm going to just go not too much and then i'm going to go here and again not too much and then now we're going to go into our middle and let's just start giving it some juice and then bring it down like what do i really want to do here so let's add some saturation because i really do want to pull the skin out right so i mean now we're creating more separation so this is before this is after so we're really adding a little bit more and after this this is one part that i really like for skin tones which is hue versus luminance so just watch this now i'm going to go ahead and select this once again i'm going to open it up a little bit not too much this time so even something like that go here do the same thing open it up a little bit and now i'm going to go back to this point so what i want to do is i want to kind of like raise that up and just give her some life not too much okay i don't like to exaggerate anything but what this is doing is like look at how much it's cleaning up her skin it's doing a lot of the work without us having to qualify it and that's best when you're working with 8-bit image we will still qualify her skin tone but this is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us okay now i want to go back to my hue versus option and i want to mess around with it because i don't i i just don't like how much yellow i put in so maybe kind of like keep it somewhere around here so this is a lot better okay so guys this was hue versus options was our second step but we're not done yet i want to do a few more things in this node and like i said queue versus options are super powerful especially with 8-bit footage and you're about to see the actual strength of it okay so i'm going to click right here in this area and once again i'm going to do the same thing so i'm going to open it up a little bit i'm going to go right here and i'm going to open this up a little bit and now i'm going to go in the middle and just look what we're doing in the back so i really want to make the background like just really separate it quite a bit okay so i'm giving it that color to complement my girl's skin and this is already separating the background so much and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go under hue versus saturation and i'm going to grab this and open it up a little bit and i just want to give it a little bit of juice right so just not too much something like that but now the real magic is going to happen in here so i'm going to go ahead in my hue versus luminance and again i open it up so that like we have a ease in and ease out if you will and now i want to bring that down so something like that now if i do before and after just look at the separation we're creating this is what i told you perfect skin tones i did not name this tutorial for no reason like we're not just doing one thing there is no one trick pony here like anytime you're going to be watching tutorials on this channel i want to make sure i respect your time and i give you guys much more than just one thing okay so look at the separation we're creating this is the thought process that i want you to you know see things from my eyes and understand what goes into all the little nuances that makes a good colorist a good colorist okay so all this was done in hue versus options okay we have done quite a bit in this and one thing that's not really setting well with me to be honest with you i'm gonna go under my hue versus saturation and i'm gonna just click right here and i think i wanna pull the saturation down from that okay i think it's just i don't know i i just don't like how sony adds unwarranted saturation in the blue channel so i want to kind of just like bring it down not too much but even something like that and i think that just really again if i do before and after just it's adding more to where the pop needs to be so this has done quite a bit for me i am very happy what we have accomplished so far so if i take these two and we started step one to our skin step two to our skin and if i do before and after i mean just look at the difference okay and it's that these subtleties that make all the difference in the world and you know i always say color grading is all about stacking so we're really stacking our image up now we're gonna get into a little bit more advanced this is our third step or third way to getting a perfect skin tones now we're gonna be getting into our actual layer mixer so the big difference between layer mixer and parallel mixer is that layer mixer isolates and parallel mixer blends in so in this case i want to grab my skin and i want to isolate it so i'm going to go ahead select my note 7 and now i just want to go into my qualifier and i just want to do this just watch this i'm going to do this and then i'm going to look at what it's grabbing and guys i told you i wasn't lying this is a 7r3 look at how terrible this key is and i wanted to grab something really difficult so you guys can see what's happening so i'm going to start going through my hue versus options i'm going to find a better center point and then i'm going to open it up so i'm opening the width quite a bit and i'm going to keep going and this is looking pretty good and then i'm gonna take my soft points and see what i can do so this is looking good i can i can leave it somewhere around here this is not looking bad and i'm going to take my luminance and like what do i want to do with that do i want to open it up or do i want to close it off so i think i can open it up to be honest with you like even something like that let me go back into my hue and move this around a little bit so i mean the key is see a little bit of work goes a very long way now this that we're grabbing these are part of the trees if i were to turn this off this is in the similar tone so i don't mind grabbing that it's totally fine now what we need to do is under my d noise i'm going to go ahead and crank it around 10-ish and look at how clean this key is that we pulled okay don't worry about these spots because these are specular highlights this spot right here this spot right there i'm going to be attacking it in this node okay so don't worry about that we grabbed a really clean key now all i have to do is i'm gonna go into my primaries so now we're in our primaries i'm gonna take my gamma and i'm gonna exaggerate it okay so just bear with me don't don't have a heart attack here just stick with me here so i'm really exaggerating it and now what i want to do is i want to take my lift and i want to lift it a little bit like give her give a really soft and smooth skin so now if i do before and after look at the amount of difference we're making i mean come on guys and now i want to take my gain and kind of put a little bit of red back in there to make it look natural okay so if i do before and after here humongous difference how much we cleaned it up like look at how much we cleaned it up and the hair is looking so much better and she's just looking so vibrant and we're not done yet i'm gonna go under my midtone detail and for girls my sauce is right around negative 30ish like look at this okay how much it gave her that angelic feel but it's not overdoing it it's almost like retouching in photoshop if you will without overdoing it so guys just look at how big of a difference we made in this node and this was our third step to getting a perfect skin tone so this one i'm to call skin and i'm going to go back to my fifth node and here what i want to do is i just want to take my gain and i want to inject some warmth and and keep an eye on these areas okay it's just going to add some warmth to that and it blends it in if i do on and off how it's just like kind of blending it in now there is one more thing trick that i'm going to show you that i want to do so i'm adding that right like warmth in the top end of my frame i don't necessarily want to affect the mid tones of my frame so now i can do that i can go in my gamma and i can cool it off so just look at i can cool off my image a little bit not too much something like that i can even blend in the difference a little bit so i can bring it back something like this right and now the highlights are looking much better and it's just look at even here there's so much more detail in the highlights now yet we haven't gone too far from where we wanted our overall image to be and i'm even going to take my lift and kind of create this cool look you know just kind of create some separation like some drama right but again not too much so i'm even gonna bring it up a little bit and now if i do before and after this is a really cool look but just look at the skin tone and skin tone is untouched okay that's not getting affected at all so now what i want to do is i want to go here and create another node and this one is going to be my pop and i'm going to create that in my curves and i'm just going to go ahead and throw like three points here okay and now what i want to do is i'm going to go ahead and control it so i'm going to go right here and kind of pick it up something like that then go grab a middle point and just kind of see where i started to get a lot of life and pop in my image so i'm going to go to this point right here and i'm just looking for a serious pop so now we're getting a pretty good pop and now another thing that i want to do in this node is let's control our highlights a little bit too so i'm going to take my gain and bring it down in this one okay i'm just going to bring down my gain a little bit and i'm going to take my gamma and lift it and i'm going to take my gain and kind of keep it somewhere around here so we're adding pop but we're still being very careful with we don't want our image to just go all over the place okay and another thing to control that is your low soft right here so i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna grab my or high soft i'm gonna grab my high soft and look what it's doing boom i was able to recover like this is before and then this is after so i was able to recover all my highlights so now if i do this we added so much pop without sacrificing anything okay so this was our pop it did quite a bit to be honest with you can we do more i don't know but let's just try it out so i'm gonna go on this point and i'm gonna try to bring it down no i think i wanna i do want to bring more pop into the into the skin so even something like that i think is pretty freaking good so i mean this is looking really good guys we're coming a freaking long way with this okay and we're still not done yet so another thing that i'm going to do create another node and then in this node let's uh go ahead and create a vignette we really need to pop her out from the background okay so i'm going to go ahead create a window i'm going to pull this up okay this is going to be the main focus but i'm still going to create one of these make it pretty big give it a shape and then go ahead and just add tons of softness and now i'm gonna invert it i'm gonna go back into my curves i'm gonna grab my curve and i'm just really be aggressive with it okay super aggressive and then open it open it okay and now i'm gonna go back into my window i'm gonna pan it around a little bit to see where it is believable so even something like that is pretty good so this added a ton of pop okay and i am calling it vignette and i'm leaving it there let's create another node this is going to be our glow and let me bring it around so we can actually see what is happening so these two nodes can come around and live right here there are finishing nodes anyways so now i'm in this node we're going to go ahead in our composite mode and we're going to change it to soft light that's okay now i'm going to go into my shrine threshold and i'm going to open up my image quite a bit like something like that that's fine now we're going to go under our spread and we're going to control it what do we want the spread to do so i'm going to put my spread somewhere around here now let's go under the brightness and control it we don't want this brightness to look too cheesy we want it to look natural now let's go back into our spread and mess around with it until like i said it's looking proper and it doesn't look cheesy let's go back into our brightness brighten it up a little bit now let's go into our blend and blend it in so it kind of goes with like what we're trying to do and now if the skin is looking a bit too red we can obviously pull that red what we can do is just go into my offset and kind of pull it down you know for the entire look and kind of keep it somewhere around here you know i don't mind that and just look at how much this helped now if we want to kind of go back and play around with it to really you know exaggerate it a little bit bring it down and another thing that i want to kind of see is that if i close off my shrine threshold i don't think it's the worst thing to be honest with you because i like that hop that i'm getting because if i do before and after now like look at i'm really liking that i'm liking that quite a bit and once again what i'm gonna do is i'm going to go in my offset and i don't want to cool it off too much i feel like so i'm gonna see where we can kind of meet in the middle so i definitely want to blend it a little bit more because i feel like bring the brightness down because i feel like right now we're really kind of just pushing it up a lot and now let's look at it from my offset okay all right guys i think this glow did the trick so i'm going to call it glow right here i didn't mean to make it all caps call it glow and now what i'm going to do is create a new node and this is very very exciting okay so this is basically going to be our fpe or what's called a film print emulation and that is included in resolve okay it's right here film looks and the one that i'm going to be using is 2383 which is very very common and is used in the industry so once you drop it on these are usually odts these are the last thing that you use before you you know print your image and if the film is going to be shown on a projector and it's going to be printed on a kodak 2383 that's where this film print emulation comes from so when you're grading you can throw this on and know exactly what it's going to look like once it's printed on there so before you guys start screaming just give me a minute okay i know it looks crushed and it looks like garbage it's pretty simple to fix the first thing i'm gonna do i'm gonna go under my key mode i'm gonna take my strength of this key and bring it down to 7.5 ish okay so just that much don't go too crazy okay this is it this is enough and now we're going to go back to my primaries and i'm going to take my contrast and i'm going to start dialing it back and just look what's going to happen boom okay it's looking beautiful so i'm going to keep it i'm going to keep it somewhere around here and maybe keep it somewhere around here i'm going to take my gain i'm going to pull it down so it gives it that film look that we're going for so we're going to keep it somewhere around here and if i turn it on and off i mean come on guys look at this so look at the skin now you get what i'm saying i mean we created this look from sony can you believe this okay and if i were to play it around i mean everything holds nothing is gonna look like garbage everything is holding up everything is looking perfect and let's just go and park it right here and now what i want to do is this is our film print emulation fpe so i'm going to leave it right there and then that's going to be the last thing that i'm going to use but if there is something that you want to use afterwards it would be your grain i would put my grain right here i would go back into my effects and i will put in my film grain and then i'm gonna go ahead and select my preset and you guys already know my preset it's 35 millimeter 400 t and then i'm going to go ahead and start adding some grain size and i'm going to add tons of grain strength so you guys can actually see what's happening and what i'm going to do is i'm going to punch in so you guys can actually see what we're really really doing so i'm going to punch in quite a bit so you guys can see it and now if i do before and after on and off you guys can actually see that the grain is working and now we can play it through and if this is a bit much for your taste you can change it i personally like it so i am going to leave that in it looks really nice but guys this is what we created okay and look at the skin tone came out of our 8-bit sony a7r 3. i'm going to click right here i'm going to kill all of these and then we're going to start from the top and walk down the line and let's see what we created so we started with saturation then i went and did my base grade so if you're not a colorist you will do this and you will be so happy that you went from this to this and you would just want to print it but because we are overachievers we're we're gonna keep going then we started working on our skin so that was the first step guys it was lift gamma gain and log wheels okay i try to get my skin like look at all of this i try to get my skin in the world in the ballpark as much as possible then i went into my hue versus options and created that separation without touching qualifiers and look how clean this is and what we were able to create we're thinking like a colorist now we're thinking like a taste maker so that is very important then we went into our skin grabbed the skin and just gave it a lot of life like just look at a lot of life like cleaned it up mid-tones all that like basically did some retouching makeup work all of that just so simply and then went and uh warmed up the highlights and it's very subtle but it does the trick and then we went in here and added a pop so this pop was very important because it just really gives the entire image a lot of life and it just cleans everything up too like see here we're clipping and now we're not clipping so that did quite a bit and then this node was legendary because we just created a vignette and then inverted it and just brought a lot of the outside down went and added glow and just gave it that angelic feel and you can obviously control this you know depending on how much you want to push this glow you know if you want to blend it in a little bit more we can go and blend it in a little bit more that it's all up to you okay what do you want to do with it so we can always go in here again and then kind of just like if you want to blend it in blend it in okay i like the way it was so i'm gonna keep it somewhere around here and then we went into our film print emulation and it just gave it such a vibe such a cool feel cool look and finally we added grain and if i were to go complete on and off where we started to where we ended up yes it's pushed yet stylized but you know so as every film and if you want to create real cinematic looks then you're looking at it okay now a different version would be if we go in here and if this is just too much for you and if you're like cozy man this this green and the foliage back there is just a bit much we can obviously go into this node right here and we can grab our green i can go and grab my green right here and then i can pull it down so instead of like exaggerating it so much i can actually bring it down but that's like i said all preference what are you looking for what do you want to do that's all up to you even if we leave it somewhere around here i think it does really well so um i would probably just leave it yeah right here somewhere so one thing that i'm noticing before we even move into checking out the final look is that the more i look at it i feel like we can dial back just a little bit on the orange in the skin so what i'm thinking to do is go in here and try to kill this and see what happens and i think i actually like the way my skin looks here when i turn it off and even like what it does to the lips and her teeth i think i'm liking all the changes but if we were to do this we have to fix the key so if i go here and do this like you can see it affected our key a little bit so just let's just go ahead and start working on it and try to dial it in so i'm gonna do this i'm gonna open it up a little bit maybe open it up a little bit more okay even something like that and now if i come out and we look at the key okay so this is looking much better and to be honest with you i feel like i'm more for it because now if i go back into my third node and turn it back on you see the skin is just i feel like a bit too orange i mean i had to really sit on it to kind of find that happy medium and i feel like for style you can go with this but i think i personally believe that this looks just a little bit more natural to be honest with you so even if we play it the key holds up everything looks good and i think i like this better to be honest so i'm gonna park it here let's check out the final look in full [Music] screen [Music] i hope you guys had a blast and remember we said three steps to build this grade but then we ended up slashing one of those three steps and that's why it's very important to have multiple nodes so if something just doesn't sit right you can easily go back and disable that node and then move along and for that specific reason i dropped a brand new training link is in the description i'm telling you 10 tips to grade 10 times faster in davinci resolve so you can spend less time on the grunt work and more time creating fun stuff on that note if you have any tutorial suggestions drop them down below i will see you all in the next video

Channel: Waqas Qazi

Views: 133,321

Keywords: davinci resolve 16, resolve 16, davinci resolve, davinci, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve studio, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, colorist, color grading, color correction, davinci resolve tutorial, blackmagic design, davinci resolve 16.2, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve 16 color grading, waqas qazi, how to use davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve effects, theqazman, color grading tutorial

Id: akPGqs7daYs

Length: 36min 5sec (2165 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020