One of the first videos I posted on YouTube
when I started last May was about correcting skin tones in Final Cut Pro. In the beginning of 2019 Final Cut Pro had
limited color grading capabilities, especially when it came to color masks. It gave us the option to try and isolate a
color, but often times it would include a variety of other unwanted shades and tones
of that color in the shot. In October of last year however, they came
out with an update which now gives us HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luma) controls in the color
inspector. Why is this is so amazing for correcting skin
tones? It means now we have the power to isolate
the skin tones with incredible precision to adjust them how we want, and not affect other
colors in our shot. Let’s do some learnin. INTRO To identify whether your skin tones are accurate
to what our eyes would see, we’ll pull up the vectorscope and the luma waveform. These two scopes are going to be your best
buddies when it comes to making skin tones natural. If you didn’t see my last week’s video
on scopes, check that out after this because I go into all scopes in some detail. So we’ll press Command 7, we’ll make sure
to have a two up scope option by pressing view, and then one of these. Then we’ll click this icon that looks like
a bar chart in a text box, and we’ll pull up the Vectorscope and the Luma Waveform. With the vectorscope, this line here is the
skin tone line. It doesn’t matter the shade of your skin,
it’ll all be on this line if accurate. What we will end up doing is crop in to our
subjects skin by using the crop tool and if it’s not on the line, like we see here,
then we’ll do some corrections to make it natural again. The luma waveform will help us to tell if
the brightness of our subjects skin is accurate to the natural brightness of human skin. Generally human skin should fall between 35
and 70 IRE on the luma waveform depending on the person’s shade. Because of this, most exposure adjustments
we make will be done in the midtones. So let’s do an example. Possibly something in your shot left a color
cast on your subjects skin like we see here. I have no idea why my skin tone was off here,
because I use a white balance card, but it is. We can tell it’s wrong just by looking at
it. Something is off. Cropping in to the skin and using the vectorscope’s
skin tone line to check will help us verify our assumptions. We like the color of our shot as a whole,
but clearly the skin tones need adjusting. So we’ll press command 6 to bring up our
color correction window, we’ll add color wheels, and we’ll press ‘add color mask’
right here. We’ll go down and make sure HSL is selected
for the mask. This was that awesome new update I talked
about in the intro. We’ll select and drag our subjects skin
till we have a good area selected, without involving too much of the rest of the shot. If you want to add more to the mask, hold
down shift and drag. But don’t get mad if things in your shot
that are a similar color are getting included in the mask, because here’s how we’ll
fine tune the adjustment. Head on down to where you made sure your mask
controls where set to HSL. By clicking ‘view mask’ we’re able to
see what was selected in the shot. The white part is the selected area that we
will be affected if we make a color correction, and the black will not be affected if we make
a color correction. H is the hue or color adjustment slider in
your mask. Generally, the dropper does a good enough
job with this, so I rarely use this one to adjust. However at times you may need to. Saturation and Luma we’ll use the most to
fine tune the mask so we can make a skin tone color correction. These top two triangles are for the range
of each category, so the range of brightness in this slider, and the bottom triangles are
for feathering, or basically to make the adjustment more gradual and softer. There is no set placement for these, since
every shot is different. It’s basically trial and error until you
find the most area of your skin tones selected in white, while leaving what you don’t want
to change in black. Once you have a good selection, we’ll turn
off the mask and head up to our sliders. Since all of my skin tones look pretty off
color, I’ll use the master color wheel to adjust the color. Push the wheel away from the general off color
of your shot and try and line up your subject’s skin color on the skin tone line in the vectorscope. We can also see that my skin is maybe a little
too bright. Yes, I haven’t been getting much sun as
of late, but it could be dragged down a tad. And we can tell that just by eyeballing it,
and by checking the luma waveform. Most color correction I do I feel like I just
eye ball it, and if it looks off, then I adjust, but it’s always good to check your scopes
to make sure your eyes aren’t being dumb. I’m going to lower the skin tones with the
midtones slider because that’s where the luma value for my skin lies. Adjusting by way of the Master, highlights,
and shadows color wheels will usually lead to a less than desirable effect. And that’s it guys! There is a chance you set your white balance
wrong while shooting and the whole shot is a certain color. This is an easier fix and you probably won’t
even need to use a color mask. So for this, just crop in on your subject’s
skin, pull up your color wheels, and push the ‘master wheel’ until the skin tones
match up with the skin tone line correctly. Click reset, and done, and check if the shot
looks balanced. If not, you can add another color wheel to
make different adjustments and proceed with masks if you think it needs a more precise
correction. If you enjoyed this video, you would enjoy
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and we’ll learn to become better creators together every week. I will see you guys next week. Stay safe out there peeps.
Another excellent video! Thank you for posting!
Just as a side note, I have noticed that when cropping to a part of the image that is in the lower half, my
waveformsvectorscope image goes away. I can get around it by moving the image up temporarily, but that seems like a pretty ad-hoc workaround. Is this something you’ve seen as well, or is there possibly something up with my setup?Edit - vectorscope, not waveform monitor