Color Finale 2 Practical Color Grading - Perfect Skin Tones

[Music] hello and welcome to the practical color grading series in this series we will use color finale to work through color correction and grating problems that both beginner and advanced users experience we will begin with the most critical problem how can you be sure that the skin tones in your videos are rendered correctly and if they aren't how can they be fixed an observer always notices something is wrong when primary colors aren't rendered correctly we find primary colors in the blue sky the green grass and the skin color of a person when the skin color is wrong the whole video feels wrong so it's very important that the color of skin looks natural but how can you fix it when it doesn't today we will show you how to fix skin colors in the simplest and fastest way using techniques that are available to color finale users before we start this tutorial there's one thing you need to do if your material is shot in raw or log in either of these cases you will need to convert your footage to a video color space such as rec 709 so that the video scopes work as expected make a habit of remembering the color space of your footage or if you're color correcting someone else's ask the client it is much easier to achieve a good result grading in the original video's color space although grading and log might offer better flexibility we'll be covering grazing and log in future tutorials also working with skin tones is easier if you use soft light and ensure that white balance is properly set in camera or by using a gray card or color checker so that you can easily fix it in post-production with all that out of the way let's get to work correcting skin colors so they are rendered correctly using final cut pro and color finale plugin we will be adjusting the three main parameters luma saturation and hue in what follows we will analyze a few examples and see how to set these parameters correctly here is a source filmed in log but let's suppose we don't know anything about the camera and the color space used for this video in cases such as these we load color finale in the final cut pro inspector and use its color management tool clicking show and selecting assume log for color profile gives us an excellent image even if we don't know what color space the camera operator was using now we need to adjust the brightness of the image in order to do this precisely and correctly we'll start by opening the luma scope to do this we will launch the video scopes panel in the viewer click the view drop down above the viewer and select video scopes or use the command 7 keyboard shortcut one or several scopes will appear depending on your monitor size if you don't have a large monitor open a single scope so that it is clearly visible for now we click the tiny scope icon in the upper right corner to open the luma scope we'll select waveform luma and ire units heritage from the analog broadcast standards ire shows the brightness of a video image from 0 to 100 ire units where in rec 709 100 represents the whites in the video and 0 the blacks if some of the waveform falls below zero it means those areas are super blacks and likely will be clipped if they are above the 100 mark these areas are called super whites and might get clipped as well right now we see the exposure of the entire image but we are only interested in the brightness of the skin areas in order to only display the brightness values of the skin we use color finale's image analysis tool we open it in the inspector and select the mask type we want from the isolate drop-down list this can be a rectangle ellipse or a horizontal line to match the shape of the face an ellipse works well in the viewer we now see an oval mask that we can tweak we need to select a small skin area we could make the mask larger but it's important to avoid the hair eyes and lips since they all differ in brightness from other skin now the lumoscope only reflects the brightness of the skin its ranges between 35 to 64 units it's been established experimentally that in soft sunlight the correct brightness value for skin should be between 40 to 70 with 40 being shadows and 70 the highlights it's important of course to take the atmospheric conditions and artistic decisions into account in night shots or in high key scenes the brightness and saturation of skin tones will be very different right now the brightness is just below 70 and 40 so we can increase it in color finale using exposure we slightly increase the brightness of the whole image so that the shadows stay in the region of 40 units and the brighter areas approach 70. let's have a look at the result now that we have defined the image exposure let's correct brightness and hue for this we will use a different scope the vector scope the vector scope is a color wheel that shows primary colors red green blue yellow cyan and magenta the more there is of a particular color in the image frame and the more that color is saturated the greater the deviation is from the center of the scope towards this color having selected a specific area in our case a skin area we can determine its tone and saturation from the vectorscope settings we can turn on the skin tone indicator if it hasn't been already by default it is turned on this is a vector that corresponds to the ideal skin tone if the skin tone falls in line with this vector we can be sure that the skin color is correct and at this point many people wonder what they should do with different skin colors some of us have more golden skin some have darker and some have lighter skin the fact is that skin always has the same tone and brightness only its saturation differs the saturation of golden skin that's common to people from asia is usually quite high and can reach halfway to the edge of the scope dark skin rarely exceeds 45 saturation and light skin as found in caucasians is the least saturated and in most cases does not exceed 30 percent except when it's been adjusted to match an artistic taste as we can see on the scope the skin is barely saturated so let's increase the saturation now we can see on the scope that the saturation has increased a little bit and the tone almost ideally fits the skin tone vector let's now use one of the easiest techniques to correct the skin tone we go over to the layers and add a color wheels layer now we can add more saturation to the highlights and mid tones as the skin color is situated mainly in this tonal area we are adjusting the mid-range and lighter parts of the image to get as close to the skin tone vector as possible in the end the scope shows an ideal fit to the skin tone let's take a look at the result [Music] let's take another example this video is also shot in log so let's use color finale again we go to color management and select assume log now the video is in the usual reg 709 color space and what we notice is how bright the scene is in this video there are many bright regions in the background let's take a look at the waveform in the lumoscope the brightness of the overall image ranges from 10 to 92 units now let's select an area of the skin again to do that from the image analysis section we select the lips and set up the mask to include only skin tones avoiding the hair and the eyes the scope now shows that the brightness of the skin is significantly below the range of 40 to 70 units but it's not good practice to raise the exposure much because if we do details in the background will start disappearing let's turn off the mask and see how the change affects the whole image since the video is shot in high key the brightest tones exceed 100 units they become fully white and all information in these parts is lost because of this we will only increase the brightness of the skin by a small amount let's select the skin again reset the exposure value and just raise it a little bit by 0.4 steps this will be enough since the bright areas of the skin are approaching 70 units and the shadows 40. let's now take a look at the skin tone and saturation by opening the vector scope we find that the saturation is too low and the tone of the skin is slightly different from the skin tone vector let's increase the saturation levels we add a little bit less than before as the skin is darker and not golden so this amount of saturation will be enough now we need to adjust the skin color a little bit again we'll use the grading tools open the layers panel and select color wheels we will adjust the color value of the highlights and mid-range areas we'll try adjusting the highlights first but as you can see if we drag the gain control until the skin looks right the white background shifts towards magenta because the image is so bright if we don't want to change the video's color values too much we can work on the mid tones instead of the highlights like this let's disable the mask and look at the result as you can see adjusting the color values of the mid tones in such a bright video has more effect on the skin but less on the background having said that it's obvious the highlights are biased towards magenta just a little bit in order to fine-tune the skin more and to keep the background white we can also use another tool the hue saturation and luma curves tool let's select the skin again turn off the color wheels and select the hsl curves in the first tab he versus hue will use the color picker to capture the skin color on the hsl curve now on our scope we have three points the center point is the color we have just picked and the two points on the sides capture neighboring colors we can move the center point to get the desired skin color but our skin covers a wider range of colors than we have just selected we really should also add yellow and magenta to do this we hold down the command and left click with the mouse to add additional points and now we have in our selection a range that's wide enough to make sure that we have captured all of the skin color let's fix the points on the curve holding down option we delete any redundant points now we can align the skin tone to the skin tone vector a bit more accurately let's view the result and compare it to the one we got with the color wheels [Music] using the hsl curves is a little bit more complicated but it gives a more accurate result with their help we could correct the skin tone without affecting the colors in the background too much [Music] let's take another example this video was also shot in log so we can use color finale again but this time we know for certain which color space it was shot in this video was shot in s-log 2 so we open up the color management section go to color profile and select use aces we choose s-log 2 as the input color space and reg-709 as the output now even without scopes it is clear that this image is too bright often when filming with s-log 2 or s-log 3 the operator deliberately increases the exposure in order to avoid noise in the shadows let's open up the lumascope and see what it looks like ok nothing exceeds the 100 units mark but the image is too bright so we must reduce the exposure we'll select a frame with the most skin visible select image analysis and then ellipse now that we have selected the skin we can see that it is still too bright to lower the exposure we once again open the layers choose the color wheels and slightly decrease the brightness of the mid tones now the midtones have decreased to 40 units and the highlights are around 70. let's now take a look at the saturation and hue with the vector scope we can see that there is not enough saturation and that the color goes off slightly into an unwanted direction towards red let's add some saturation but only a little bit because the skin is light it needs to remain light at this point we'll add some color to the highlights so that the tone matches the skin tone vector let's disable the mask and see the before and after the skin tone is on the vector but if we zoom in we will see that the face has a tinge of red that seems to cover but blends in with the actual skin tone this unfortunately sometimes happens when shooting an s-log 2. let's try to adjust the skin tone in such a way that makes this shade of red less prominent so we again head to the layers and use the hsl curves tool opening the hue vs hue tab we'll use the color picker and select the color we want to get rid of now our selection is represented on the curve we click on a point in the center and drag it up so that the transition is less noticeable but we must take care not to turn the skin green if this isn't enough we can go to the hue vs saturation tab and again with the help of the color picker select the color which we want to make less prominent here we lower the middle point to reduce the saturation of the red and now the transition into the red has become less noticeable let's have a look at the before and after with this technique you can get rid of any undesirable colours [Music] we have shown how it's possible to get the desired skin tones without resorting to more complicated tools in most cases basic tools are sufficient for this purpose the layout and functionality of call finale allows you to do this quickly and conveniently but if the shooting conditions are more complicated you may need to use slightly more advanced color finale tools for working with color for example masks we will talk in detail about such tools in future videos tell us in the comments which topics interest you most and if you have any remaining questions about this video please let us know see you in the next video

Channel: Color Finale

Views: 7,566

Keywords: FCPX, white balance, color temperature, temp, tint, color matching shots, auto white balance, color charts, color correction, color grading, xrite, color checker passport video, grey scale chart, cinematic look, final cut pro, Final Cut Pro X, Final Cut Pro X tutorial, final cut, skin tone, skin, tones, grading, luma, saturation, hue, video scopes, rgb, colorfinale, color finale, color finale 2, color finale 2 pro, exposure, curves, skin color

Id: zy45AtRjTE0

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021