Davinci Resolve: Skin Tone Secrets

there's no single aspect of color grading more important than skin tone skin tone is one of the first things that we praise when we're talking about images that we love and it's one of the first things that we blame when we find an image unpleasant but what are the factors that make skin tone good or bad are they always the same what can we do to influence them in the right direction today i'm going to show you the way i think about and work with skin tone inside davinci resolve so let's start by establishing a practical definition for skin tone skin tone refers to the reproduced hue saturation and luminance of our subject's skin so how can we objectively determine whether that reproduced hue saturation and or luminance constitute skin tone that's good or bad well we need to start by understanding that good skin tone is contextual and there's no single formula for it let's take a look at the skin tones in some of these film stills now i've set up power windows to isolate a patch of skin in each frame and as you can see the readings that i'm going to get from them on my vector scope are going to vary quite a bit depending on the subject and the lighting and the overall grade so unfortunately i can't offer you a one-size-fits-all solution for getting great skin tone but what i can give you are three principles you can use to evaluate and improve your skin tone so let me go over here to my skin tone grades timeline and let's dive right into that first principle which is that good skin tone starts with getting a close perceptual match to what the camera sensor was shown how do we accomplish this with color management using a system such as aces you guys have heard me talk about color management and aces in the past quite a bit and if you're ready to dive into a full video on this subject definitely let me know in the comments it's a lot to bite off but if there's interest i'm game to tackle it with you guys so you can see that just through the use of my aces color management system on these images i've already got a good perceptual match to what the camera sensor was shown and i've got some nice looking skin tones right off the bat so that's principle number one that's the foundation that we're going to build on top of for the rest of this video so principle number two is that good skin tone often not always but often reflects our shared memory color for skin memory colors are something else you guys have heard me talk about quite a bit in the past memory colors are colors which precur often enough and are important enough to us as human beings that we maintain a sort of stored ideal for them in our minds and of all the memory colors skin is actually the most important so let's think about that when we bounce back over for a moment to our skin tone examples timeline where we've already established that the skin tone patches in each of these frames are going to meter in a slightly or significantly different point on the scopes here however if i go in and i average the values of each of these patches down to a single rgb value and i then average all of those averages together i'm going to be left with a single rgb value which will look something like this and if i now take this single solid color and pull it back into resolve and look at it on my vector scope we're going to see that it's landing right up here in this upper left quadrant of the scope now what's interesting is if i go to my vector scope settings and i pull up this setting to show skin tone indicator you're going to see that that value lands almost perfectly on this line which has appeared and this skin tone indicator is here for this exact purpose it's to give us a target to aim at when we are looking to adjust our skin tone so this is a principle that we can apply when we're dealing with skin tone we can look at where our skin tone is plotting in relation to this line and make adjustments to get a better alignment let's take a look at an example i'm going to go back over here to my skin tone grades and let's take a look here at shot number five where thus far i've just made a little bit of an exposure drop like so and i've cooled things off a bit here so let's go to our empty node three for now and i'm next gonna go to the timeline section of my node graph where i've planted an empty power window off to the right of my final output transform and what i want to do here is pull a sample of my subject's skin and i'm now going to turn my highlight mode on and look at where that skin is metering so you can see that it's close but it's definitely a bit counterclockwise of this skin tone line which we've enabled in our vector scope so let's turn our highlight mode off now go back to the clip level and i'm going to go into my curves and i'm going to look for my hue versus hue curves i'm going to take my eyedropper and drag a nice broad sample of my subject's skin like so and with the control points that i'm given down here in the hue versus hue curves i'm going to take that middle one and i'm going to rotate it say 10 degrees upward like so and now if we go back over to our timeline level and re-examine our skin tone patch we're going to see that we have a much tighter alignment to our skin tone indicator and one caveat to keep in mind when you're making these kind of hue versus hue adjustments is you're often going to need to accompany them with a hue versus sat depending on whether you're rotating toward or away from a more primary color in this case we're rotating toward a more primary red away from a more secondary yellow so we're getting this kind of perceptual saturation increase that i want to counter with a hue versus sat adjustment so i'm going to go to my hue versus sat curve eyedropper her skin once again and take that middle control point and drop it down to say a 0.9 that's just going to preserve the perceptual saturation of my subject's skin as i rotate it toward that more primary red now if it were coming in redder than the skin tone line initially and i was having to rotate it counterclockwise down i would likely need to do the exact opposite here and increase my saturation to maintain a perceptually neutral saturation level so this is a great example of being aware of our skin tone line taking a reading for our skin tone and comparing it and then making an adjustment to get a bit of a tighter alignment and thus better skin tone out of our grade now i want to move on to our third and final principle which sort of stands as a counterpoint to the second principle and that's that creative intent is ultimately the most important factor for your skin tone so let's go over here to shot number six and i want to go back to my timeline level and back to this sort of skin tone sampling window that i've got set up here and i'm going to adjust that window so that it's centered on her cheek here and let's take a reading for where that skin tone is sitting before even having made any adjustment my skin tone is resting almost perfectly right here on my skin tone line however in this case i have a creative intent for this shot that is actually going to move my skin tone significantly off of this line and that's okay let me show you how that's going to go down let's go back to the clip level here i'm going to go to my gallery where i've saved a grade for this shot that reflects my creative intent and i'm going to apply it so you can see i've got a much cooler much more desaturated kind of moody palette going on here now and i like this grade much better than what i started with it's more in line with my idea for what this scene needs to look and feel like and if i go back over once again to my little skin tone sampling window here and i turn on my highlight mode you're gonna see that our skin tone is way further away from the skin tone line where it started on and that's okay because this overall grade reflects my creative intent and my skin tone should travel with it and that's really what i want to leave you guys with which is that creative intent is the most important factor when it comes to skin tone so yes we want to be perceptually accurate to what the camera sensor saw yes we can be aware of our skin tone line and move things toward it if we feel like our skin tone is suffering but ultimately we need to feel free to be guided by our creative intent and let our skin tone land wherever it's going to as a result so i hope this helps you guys simplify your thinking about skin tones and give you some tangible principles to think about and apply the next time you're dealing with these issues in your grades

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 36,748

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Id: CFwKvMZ309U

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021