Davinci Resolve 18 | How to Get Perfect Skin Tones

if you're tired of your skin tones looking like an Oompa Loompa or looking like the Incredible Hulk then you want to stick around for this video what's going on guys it's Kofi boa in today's video we're going to be talking about dialing in your skin tones now on DaVinci Resolve there are multiple ways that you can color grade color correct and overall bring in your image but skin tones is really essential especially when you're working with people now in this video I'm going to show you not one not two but three different ways that you can dial in your skin tones using DaVinci Resolve as a tool there are two things that you want to make sure that you're doing before you start color grading your footage number one you want to make sure we're exposing properly you want to do yourself some favors and make sure that you're exposing for the correct skin tones for the correct ire value that's on your camera and number two all three of these methods are going to chase something called the flesh line now this is going to be a clean line that's going to be on your vector scope that's indicated on DaVinci Resolve and basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to bring the values of our skin into that zone to make sure that we have accurate skin tones no matter what monitor you're using to edit your footage all right now that we're in DaVinci Resolve we can can dive into the three ways that you could adjust and nail down your skin tones now right off the bat we actually are going to be using a five note tree it's a pretty simple way of getting around things but you always want to make sure that you have your color space transformed at the end in order for you to convert your log footage into something like Rec 709 so you're working in a color space that's going to be visible on the screens from your computers or your cell phone now if you guys want to find more information on how to do that there are a couple of videos on this channel that show you how to actually organize your color space transform and just overall color grading now we're going to dive into our first clip so right off the bat I'm going to go to my exposure node so we do have our exposure our white balance saturation and then finally our skin and we're going to use this for all three of the clips but you notice right about here things look a little bit Overexposed and I'm going to go over into my waveform and I'm going to see that things are very Overexposed there's a couple of flat lines here which are representative of the lights up here but there's absolutely no blacks they're really really high up so what I can do is I can actually start are to use my offset my primary wheels and start bringing those down now you can go too far to find out where it gets solid on the other end and then start bringing it back up to when you get a little bit more spread that way you're still using some of the dynamic range that you have but you're not crushing your blacks which are also not blowing out your highlights now if you want a quick and dirty way to balance your white balance if you do have situations with white walls that I have back here you could actually just take this little eyedropper tool here hover it right over there and I click on it and it has white balance now I did have a 5600 light coming from right here this is the forza 300 and that actually gave me some really good representation on skin but I will use that white balancing tool if I need to do something really quick and on the Fly next we're going to go over to our saturation now the saturation kind of node is basically what I use just to pop the colors a little bit to make it a little bit easier to key out in post so I'm going to go down over to here and I'm just going to pump up the saturation a little bit I'm going to go up to well that's way too much I'm going to go back down to maybe 60 and that looks like that makes a lot of sense now we're going to do is we're just going to go backwards to check our work before we start dialing in our skin tone so that saturation on that's saturation off this is going to be our saturation our white balance off and that's back on and then obviously there's a big difference in our exposure we bring that back now that things are looking pretty decent there's a lot of information spread across here we can start to dial in our skin now the first method that we're going to use is actually going to be something that's really familiar to you which is going to be our hsl curves what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to my skin node over here I'm going to click onto my curves and basically I'm going to do is you have your hug versus Hue your saturation versus Hue and your luminance versus Hue I'm going to go over here as I'm just going to click on here right now my eyedropper tool by default in a lot of situations is already on and all I'm going to do is I'm going to click to get my sample to find out where my skin tones are lying and it actually makes a lot of sense it's right here into the kind of red and orange side which you want to find your skin tones on on a hue curve now if you don't find that the skin tones are here when you click on skin you might have to go back in one of these steps and either reset your white balance or just change a couple things in your exposure to make sure that it's sitting in the right place but this is a pretty healthy spot now the middle dot is going to be where things are going to adjust and rotate on so if I go all the way down there and I pump in a bunch of greens well it actually kind of looks like the Hulk and if you actually want to go up here you can put more magenta and that looks like Grimace if Grimace was jacked uh so we're gonna go park things right into where I think it makes a lot of sense because my Vector scope isn't on just yet but we're just going to put that we're going to put a little bit of Reds in there just where I think that makes sense now if you notice as I go to the extremes there's still little bits of skin that aren't necessarily changing and that's because where these two dots are the parameters on where your skin tone adjustment lies are a little bit too narrow and if you find that patches of skin aren't really following the Hue adjustments you're making you could just expand that just a little bit now skin tones aren't just colors of orange they also have some Reds they have some yellows in there so when I expand this just a little bit it makes life a bit easier now I can start to make those adjustments and you can tell that it kind of covers a better area on your skin tone it makes things look a little bit more like it makes sense all right so I'm going to park it here and that looks pretty good to me but if I want to check my work I'm going to go for my waveform over here to my Vector scope now what you're going to find here is that orange flesh line that we were talking about earlier in this video we want to have our skin tones that line up onto here to make sure that they're nice and accurate right about now I'm looking at it and you can find if I put my eyedropper tool on here it'll give me an indication of where those tones are landing and they are a little bit on the yellow side of things so I do have to kind of shift it back over here which I can do by going right back to my Hue versus Hue curve and moving that a little bit up so that information is split right down the middle and we have some pretty balanced and pretty dialed down skin tones alright so let's go into method number two for dialing our skin tones now we are going to use a lot of the same techniques that we did in clip number one and we're just going to use a different tool for that skin node so basically what we are here is where the exposure node and things are a little bit under exposed here and basically what I am going to do is I'm going to use my primaries once again and I'm going to start doing this little dance between my gain and my lift that way I have a little bit more exposure on places where their skin a little bit of the background in here just to make sure that things don't look overly dark and Moody because that's not the look I'm going for now we're going to do is we're going to go over to our white balance and right off the bat I can tell there is a little bit off balance it's a bit more on the yellowish green kind of area so what I'm going to do is go to that little eyedropper tool here at the bottom and I'm going to go over the wall That's supposed to be white I'm going to click onto it and that's going to give me my white balance but things do look a little bit more magenta especially around our skin so what I'm going to end up doing here is I'm just going to peel this back a bit our tint has us at 6.25 or 6.75 and I'm just going to pull back that magenta back into the green and that looks like it makes sense and it's in the ballpark we're looking for now we're going to go on to our skin node and instead of using the curves that we did before we're going to move over one tool over and go over to our color warper now our color warper is a very powerful tool it's a lot like the curves but you do have a little bit more flexibility you can choose entire sections of a color spectrum and you can make some adjustments from there now you do see this little spider web with a bunch of dots in there and that's really great if you want to use things like 8-bit footage but because I'm shooting in 10-bit I'm going to go down over into here and I'm going to click the number 12. reason being is that there's a couple more points in terms of color that I want to use when I'm shooting in 10 bit footage I want to make sure that I can get as granular as I possibly can if I ever need to now you might not need to do this step it's specific to whoever you wants to use it but it's something that I do in my workflow now you can use color warper in two different ways you could use that same eyedropper we did in tool number one and you can adjust your hue and your saturation the same way because it is on one single little red point that you can see on that spider web and you can adjust your saturation however you would like gonna reset these or what I usually do just like our Hue and saturation curve I actually choose an entire Spectrum or entire section of color so I could make those adjustments and I don't have too many problems so right about here is where you're going to find most skin tones it's going to be a little bit of yellow a little bit of orange a little bit of red and sometimes a little bit of magenta as well and what I can do now is I can start to move those Hues and rotate them a little bit and you can see that the skin is actually starting to change so we can go over here and we have another Hulk looking character now and we can go all the way back and things look not good so I'm going to park that right into the middle where things look great to my eye and I can also play around with that saturation if I want to have more saturation more color and punch in the skin I can and or if I want to move this back just to peel it back a little bit to mute things up a little bit that looks like that makes a ton of sense and that looks really good so we're going to go through some before and then after so that is after the color warper that's before there's a little bit more yellow tones in the skin this is without saturation and the color warper this is going to be about the white balance color warper or saturation and this is if we just had a Rec 709 conversion now keep in mind with the color warper because I picked a range there may be some other colors mixed into here that might show up on our little vectorscope wheel over here so you want to use your better judgment typically for me if I do see that little tone on the side here I could find that's going to be my skin tone especially when I hover over top of it and basically what I want to do is I want to split that little blotch in half however big or small it is I want to split that in half using this little flush line over here and that's our second method of actually dialing in our skin tones all right now we are in our third and our final method to dial in our skin tones and the person on the screen might look a little bit familiar to you so let's start to get this method going so right off the bat I'm going to say that I've already done my exposure my white balance and my saturation one don't want this tutorial to be super long and two we're going to be beating a dead horse because we've done this in the other clips now first thing that we're going to do is we're actually going to move one tool over so we've used our curves we've used our color warper now we're in this little box here called our qualifier which is the eyedropper now what we're going to do is going to go over to our qualifier take our eyedropper and we're just gonna click on the selection of our skin now that doesn't look like that's done much but if I press shift H what ends up happening is you start to see this map or where you can start to adjust something called your key to really dial in the color you're trying to select so you can make those adjustments right off the bat I'm going to go over to my Hue and I'm just going to kind of shorten the range a little bit just to make sure that the colors I don't want in my selection aren't going to be there I don't want necessarily greens I don't really want yellows in there I don't even want magentas in there because things are dialed in pretty well from a white balance perspective so I want to try to see if I can get as much skin as I possibly can now you could adjust the parameters of how much light from our Luma even how much level of saturation is that you want to key out and you can make these adjustments to make sure that we're getting the most out of skin now you will see there's a little bit of dots on here and we could actually clean that up by going right over to our matte finesse and increasing our clean black basically it's taking a blocks my sweater or any Shadows that have even a little bit of that orange tone in it and I'm starting to clean that up by taking those out of my key so you can see any of my facial hair is gone a lot of my sweater is gone a lot of the things that have shadows are not going to be there as I turn this all the way up then we're going to go over to number two on our matte finesse and I'm just going to tearing up my denoiser just so if there is a little bit of specs and you can see if you look really closely it's going to start to smooth those out so things don't look incredibly ridiculous all right now that we have our key done all I'm going to do is I'm going to press shift H one more time and as you can see absolutely nothing's happened but because we selected the color accurately and properly we could actually make a ton of adjustments in our skin tones if I want to add temperature into it I can make this cooler and I could look like one of those people that ate one of Willy Wonka's candies or I can go the other way and I could look like an Oompa Loompa probably not a good idea to do that if I want to adjust the saturation of my skin you could dial those things in any which way that you'd like to I'm actually going to bring this back a little bit just because it did come in a little bit hot because I turned that saturation up and you can adjust the Hue onto there as well now you want to pay attention to your vector scope because I take this and I go all the way to 100 if you see that little flake that little kind of Speck that's on there you see that flipping around you could actually indicate where that skin tone is starting to hit so I'm going to just adjust it to right where the difference kind of gets split in half in terms of it on being on that flesh line that bloodline you keep talking about and it's sitting right into that ballpark over there and I could check my work by having a look at it and seeing where it's sitting now what I will say is that this looks a little bit too orange for my liking things look a little bit too green for me so I'm actually going to take my tint and I bring that tint back and I'm going to put a little bit of Magenta in there now you can use it just using the part on Top here or you could actually go to your gain Gamma or your lift and you could actually bring things backwards because the opposite or when you take away green you're going to actually add a little bit more magenta there for sake of this tutorial I'm just going to use the tint option here in there that looks like kind of around the ballpark as I want things again this is a quick and dirty grade and just a really quick overview on how you can use different methods to dial in skin tones and DaVinci Resolve so let's go to the before and after of this so this is going to be after your skin tone adjustment this is with it on a little bit desaturated but that's the way I like it if you want to take that saturation out and your skin tone that's how things are looking white balance and our exposure so that's with everything off and just being in Rec 709 and that's with everything back in again you could really finesse this you could play around with it you could add different things that you want into your colors but those are the three methods that you can use to dial in your skin tones using DaVinci Resolve so we have a little bit of an outfit change magic but I hope you guys learned some ways that you could dial in your skin tones using DaVinci Resolve I know a lot of you guys are transitioning over from other programs into Da Vinci and you might be a little bit confused on how to do some of the same things that you were using in your older editors that being said if you do like videos just like these leave a comment down below and I'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Kofi Yeboah

Views: 7,183

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, color grading, skin tones, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve 17, color grading tutorial, davinci resolve studio, resolve color grading, davinci resolve effects, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, skin tone workflow, waqas qazi, skin tone tutorial, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve 18 tutorial

Id: ztYLRZH5Fos

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022