Color Grading DARK Skin | Davinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

what is up I'm Marcel and welcome back to modern filemaker in this video we were color grading in DaVinci Resolve to work with skin tones and particularly dark skin tones if you guys like videos on color grading in DaVinci Resolve definitely make sure to give this video a like it would really help me out and make sure to subscribe because we are getting into some craziness this year and it's about to get really good but without further ado let's jump in DaVinci Resolve and start killing it so we are here in the victory resolve 16 with a new project and of course the first thing I'm going to do is drag in some media here to the media pool do not change and from here I've just got a clip of my buddy Braden he's a fellow photographer here in Nashville and it's just it's almost like a PSA type shot have you guys ever seen those commercials where they're like don't kill the animals we need the environment and other important stuff that you should be listening to you yeah kind of something like that that's what I'm thinking for this shot it's kind of got that vibe and I've got this portion of the clip here where he's talking and he's out of focus here and the camera pulls back to bring him into focus and then it keeps pulling back any kind of fades out of focus boom so now we have our parameter set here and we can right click this clip and create a new timeline using selected clip create about a bang boom there's our timeline with just the portion of the clip that we wanted and as a matter of fact one thing you can also do if you have clip selected and separated I've showed this in other videos well ahead and show it again if you double click the clip you want to drag in I don't want the audio from this clip I just want the video so here you have the option and I can just grab this video here boom and it comes in without the audio and now we just have our clip perfect for a color grading tutorial and I'm gonna go to a portion of the clip where he is extremely InFocus let's go about right here it looks good go over to the color tab and from here I mean right off the bat guys one thing to know about darker skin is it is literally the exact same color as lighter skin it's just darker I don't know how that works it's actually kind of amazing to me that that is science but black people and Caucasian people are technically the same color tone but one is just darker kind of crazy I kind of blows my mind but I would have honestly thought that one was slightly a different color if I have just off my eye before I started studying this stuff I would have thought they're different colors obviously but really they're the same exact hue generally just darker people have a darker luminance to their skin tone which is kind of wild but there's a few things we'll have to watch out for in that process and working with that and right off the bat I'm gonna go ahead and white balance cuz I can already tell this shot is a little warm and it can be kind of hard to tell that now but if I just move the temperature say down yeah about two 319 and then move the tint over a little bit to bring some of that red bit and then if I just deactivate this control D now by seeing it before we can really tell how separated the colors were not and I can maybe bring the tip a little more over to the right about to 340 because one thing is you know when your white balance is off you usually can tell you kind of have this general tint over everything and now it's a little warm by activating this node we have much more separation you can tell at the background sheet this was actually shot in a studio so this was a studio background that was kind of a splotchy white to gray black thing and then his hat was obviously white and black and then he is brown his shirt is like a denim blue and now all that is very clear so moving forward we just need to make sure that his skin too is on and correct and we can do that with the vector scopes if I go over here the parade's go to vector scopes and then here in the same node I'm gonna make a power window I'm gonna make this power window a circle and I'm gonna go up to the forehead and then I'm going to make this really small so we have a little bit of skin there and you can do this anywhere where there's you know a nice balanced amount of skin I'm just using the forehead because that seems to be a pretty good spot in this picture and then I'm gonna bring the softness all the way down hit the highlight button and then now in the vectorscope so we can see the skin tone line and how our skin lines up to it or how our power window how that information just right there lines up to our skin tone line if you can't see the skin tone line make sure to go to the Settings button in the vectorscope you've got the show skin tone indicator you've also got the show times to zoom so you know sometimes the information here especially depending on what resolution and what size screen you're working with can be really small just by clicking that button you can you know visualize things a lot better and also I turn my vectorscope all the way up it's the brightness I turn it all the way up just so you can really see what's going on boom so the reason I did this in the white balance node is because we can easily change this while we're here looking at the power window so if I move the tint a little more over to the green boom now our skin tone is pretty spot-on I don't know how you can get more on than that from here it's really just preference if you want more saturation in your skin or less but as far as on the line that's what you want to go for and and just in this you know whether you're a Caucasian Asian African American Indian this skin tone line your skin tone should always fall on this line for the most natural look and I'm gonna click off the highlight button and the next thing I'm noticing about the shot in particular is just that it is very bright very a little blown out in some spot somebody go back to the parade I'm gonna make a new node with alt s and I'm gonna delete our power window from this node it's by hitting the reset button in the window tab boom now we were white balanced and ready to move forward and another thing with darker skin which really creates that look that you'll see in a really awesome photography with darker skin people is how it's almost like the highlights and the shadows lose saturation too as maybe lighter skin we'll get a little more Brown in the darker places and maybe blown out in the highlights but here you can see that it's pretty much a solid brown tone and then here you see it almost seems like you know there's just a lack of saturation which is really cool and we're gonna kind of emphasize this but also help the fact that it's a little blown out because you do not want it this blown out to where it looks like a hot spot on the face and that can be easy to get when you're lighting people with darker skin also in the shadows you can kind of see these almost desaturated they're almost cooler tones in instead of warmer tones in the shadows of his face and that's also something you want to be kind of aware of when you go to capture or go to color darker skin because you may want that in your image or you may not I do not so I'm going to try to fix that throughout this tutorial with this note I am just going to add some contrast so we can dull this out a little bit and mmm let me try to do this with the shadows actually no we're pretty much almost clipping at the bottom so by doing with this with the curves I can make sure that this point here will stay there because see this will crush it if I move this down if I use the shadows it will just start throwing things into the black which may look good just visually right off the bat you know kind of just first glance but this is not what you want in your image and we've got a lot of crushed blacks around his hat and in his beard and we could keep a lot of that information and still get that same pop if we do it a different way so I will move this whoops I will move the shadow back to zero and go ahead and do this in the curves I'll make a point towards the highlights where I like them I think let's go about right here and I'll just start bringing this down and now if we look at the scopes as I bring this down it's not shoving everything to zero it's just smoothly shifting the lower spectrum down I like that much better already so let's go on to the next node and this is where I'm going to hit go ahead and fix these highlights here I'm gonna hit the highlight button go over to the qualifier and try to pretty much grab just those highlights but I want to be careful not to overdo it like I don't want it to be like this I want it to be kind of far out here because I want to be able to roll off nicely with masks we're pretty much masking now and we do not want this to be noticeable at all so that pretty far out feathered pretty good I can push it a little further in and then maybe a little D noise and a little blur and another thing I'm going to do is make a power window because I honestly do not want to get his lip I love where his lip is right now it's like almost clipping but not and they're really just the lighting there adds a lot of detail to the lip so I'm gonna go ahead and leave that I also like the highlights on his hat so I'm going to leave that also so I'm gonna make a power window boom drag this up here to these highlights that I'm going for I will shrink this down make sure I got what I need that'll probably work yep I'm gonna track this I'm gonna go ahead and track it right now before I forget love it tracking is so easy in DaVinci Resolve and it's so simple and so effective and so accurate that is the biggest thing just accuracy I don't feel like I'm wasting a lot of my time I know I can depend on the tracker so that looks pretty good and now we can kind of go to the gain and I'm gonna bring down these highlights actually I might do this with the actual highlight control here and see what that gives us oh yeah that's nice that was a good idea good idea see if we go too far then now it's kind of getting like a gray thing it's starting to lack color and we got to be careful there so maybe 30 40 38 somewhere in there maybe even lower yeah maybe 44 maybe we'll get it a little gray but then we will bump a little warmth through the temperature and then a little tint to the right boost that a little bit to add the correct tone back in and then maybe I'll push this highlight up a little more yeah now if I turn this off on off on its he's still you know the shading is still there the lighting is still there but it's far less distracting it's just less distracting which is awesome it looks more natural and you know your your normal viewer would never notice but you know it's funny once you start doing this and the first time you run into someone that actually knows what they're talking about and they look at your videos and they're like well they start critiquing then you feel like an idiot it doesn't matter how many normal people that don't do videography you're like you're the man that one pro is like in and you're like okay alright well alright I'm gonna remember that I'm gonna remember that forever all right so moving forward sorry rambling moving forward I'm loving where at right now but there's one more thing I wanted to do I kind of want to soften his skin but I want to soften his skin without softening his beard without softening his lips and without softening his hat how are we gonna do that I'm gonna create a new new node with all s and coming here to the qualifier and I'm just gonna try to drag this along where his skin is boom and then click highlight see we're getting everything pretty good I'm pretty pleased with this and now we can make some adjustments here to kind of clean this up maybe soften the lows a little bit it's a little choppy and the shadows I don't need as bad and I definitely want any of the beard belt there's fine and then let me move this whip up and see what happens all right not too far I'm gonna move the center remember I don't want the lip in there I love how the lip is so I want to keep that okay here we go here we go people now we're cooking with gas idiot let's see turn these highs up sometimes what to qualify you just got to be patient take your time poke around a little bit until you find that magic spot dang it I want the highlights I don't want the lip okay I'm gonna stick with that I'm a denoise blur and hit the highlight button and I'm going to go ahead and go to the mid-tone detail MD on this number 2 tab at the very bottom left I'm going to decrease this and you see the difference here if I crank this up now he looks like an old man a lot of mid-tone detail high contrast in the mid-tones which we are going to sharpen this and I will show you but for now in this note I really want to smoothen that skin out almost give him a younger look but not too much younger but I do slightly want to overdo it so you know start at zero go down until it's like okay that looks natural and then push it a little more little more yeah and that looks kind of wild right now let me deactivate hey let me do you activate this and you guys see the difference I like that to me it just this highlight shadow roll off looks a little hard the whole shot just looks a little hard and when somebody's trying to tell a message like if this wasn't an actual kind of like PSA or even like a music video or something and people you want you want to draw people in it's okay to be gritty but you want to do it as beautifully as you can you want to make it easy to look at you know and let me deactivate this one more time see that's just it's kind of nice and then I can press alt s give me a new node also also another thing if you really want to dictate skin luminance like if I wanted him to be darker this would be a good node for me to kind of pull things down on because I could get his skin a little darker if I wanted with this node in particular and I do kind of like that kind of gives his face more contrast you still have the highlights but now you have these deeper tones see oh I love that now we click off and it's like oh what's going on it almost looks crazy but I do prefer that I can pump the highlights up a little more and I'm gonna move forward in this next note we're pretty much gonna do the opposite thing we just did but I'm gonna do it to the entire thing so I'm gonna add mid-tone detail to this entire image by pushing that mid-tone detail up and maybe a little bit of contrast also and you know what we've done here which is really cool is we've sharpened the beard and we've softened the face but we haven't lost any detail in the glasses in the lines of his eyes if I deactivate the last two nodes that we've added see that and that detail on his lip has stayed the exact same this is just beautiful and his skin that skin tone now looks more rich and deep and overall if I deactivate that and activated it almost it just yeah just pops it pops in a more elegant kind of way to me this it just looked too high contrast and I don't know I just didn't this looks a lot less abrasive but still really punchy it still pops out at you and look at that freaking beard man sick and another thing you can do you can't add sharpness I mean you can add sharpening I go to the blur I'll pull this down by one maybe to just go 2.48 but be careful with the sharpening because it can it can do your own but now if we deactivate and activate yeah and look at these eyes his eyes don't change at they're still just as sharp and as punchy as they were in the beginning and now if we deactivate all of this uh oh my just come on come on so what else can we do one more thing I will do is add another note on s and I'm gonna add some more highlights you can do that but they're gonna be softer highlights so I'm gonna go to the qualifier hit the highlight button move the lows and the luminance up to about here so I get it a little bit of shirt a little bit of neck even a little bit of lips and then soften also getting some of the background actually as a matter of fact I don't want to get the background I'm gonna add a little D noise add a little blur go to the power window make an oval soften the crap out of it and move the size down to like here yep love it hit off the highlight button now we can go to the primary's bars and first I'm going to move the game up move the game up a little and then I'm gonna do my thing I'm gonna go to the mid-tone details and I'm gonna move these down which gives them a little soft if I push it up see that which you may want in your image if you're making a super high contrast like if we were actually just making it picture like if I was just making a portrait of this guy and exporting a PNG or something I would take a far more detailed approach with this but because it's a video you know when you play it back things can get all out of whack so I'm gonna move this mid-tone detail down to just soften that a little bit and one thing I've been playing with recently to you is a little mist this mist here seen if you could missed those to add any kind of yeah it's not really necessary but sometimes if you have a really hot highlights you can miss them and it kind of gives them like a little glow it works a little better with windows and stuff like that now if I deactivate this one that's a small difference but I personally do like how the Roloffs here is much longer if I turn this on see now it's like right here a little less bright less bright less bright less bright less bright less bright less private less right dark dark dark bright dark so with this off it's more like high light and then it kind of shuts off around here and this kind of extends those highlights making my boy Braden here pop I'm little more than usual and I believe that oval will probably stay exactly where his face is but I will go ahead and track it anyway just in case you never know god I love color grading it's so sick it's just like a Candace of unlimited tools that are limited by the program but and your knowledge of the program but you guys get what I'm saying so here we've created something really dope with taking it from super lame to free sick and I'm proud of but I hope you guys are proud of it and I hope you guys follow it along and made something that you're proud of for yourself and I hope you learned something and I hope you like the video and if you did like the video definitely make sure to click that like button and if you didn't like the video definitely make sure to click the like button anyway and if you have any comments questions or concerns please leave them down below I always reply and make sure to subscribe and as always I am Marcel there's been a mother filmmaker and I'll see you all next time hey [Music]

Channel: The Modern Filmmaker

Views: 28,055

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Id: 7sd9md6cJZw

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2019