Don't Mess Up Your Skin Tones! 5 Color Grading Tools For Perfect Skin!

imagine that you've been hired to create a video you've finished it up and you've sent it to the client and you are anxiously awaiting the response when that email finally comes through it says something like the video looks pretty good for the most part but something feels wrong with the color like all the people are kind of green so you rush to your computer you pull the project back up and sure enough the people do look a little bit green but you must have just gotten used to it when you were color grading the problem here is actually a problem of two parts the first part is that as humans we are incredibly sensitive to slight discolorations in skin tones if the skin looks wrong even if it's just a little bit will feel like something is off unless there's some kind of artistic reason for it and the second part of the problem is that you may not be using all the tools that are available to you to make sure that your skin tones are right in the first place so in this video I'm going to show you five different tools that you can use to get perfect skin tones and at the end we'll also tie it all together with a little bit of practical advice if you learn how to use these tools or even better if you learn to use them in combination with each other you will never get that green skin note from a client again so secure the cup and let's get into it quick disclaimer I'm going to be showing you how to do this all in DaVinci Resolve but no matter what software you're using most of these tools or methods are going to be available to you and you may just have to look for where they are in your software the very first thing that you need to know before you change a single color in your image is how to tell whether you're actually getting the right skin tones or not this is ultra important because as we discussed earlier you can't necessarily trust your eyes and a lot of people don't have properly calibrated monitors either so to do this we're going to need to find something called the vector scope individually resolve on the color page age the vector scope can be found in the bottom right corner by clicking on the Scopes button and then under the drop down click vectorscope the vectorscope is a circle that shows you where your colors are in your image and how saturated they are there should be some kind of blob of light or color in the vector scope and the location of that blob will tell us what colors we have in the image and the further that it goes out towards the edge of the vectorscope will tell us how saturated those colors are basically it looks very much like a color wheel if you're used to looking at those now if we go to the vector scope settings we've got a bunch of things that we can mess around with in here but the most important thing for our purposes today is going to be to enable the skin tone line indicator once we enable this there is now a line on our Vector scope that will tell us if our skin tones are in the right color range regardless of how light or dark the skin of the subject is for natural skin tones we want it to be close to or directly on the line the other rule that I hear thrown around a little bit is for saturation for lighter skin tones you may want them to go 20 to 30 percent outwards on the vector scope and for darker skin tones you may want them between 25 and 50 on the vector scope but I recommend to take this with a grain of salt and use that guideline in combination with your own subjectivity for what looks right in the scene a quick little bonus for any of the different Scopes if you click the three dots in the top right corner and choose display qualifier Focus then make sure that you have your qualifier selected in the bottom left of the viewer now you can hover over anything in your scene and it will show you a little circle in the Scopes to indicate what you're pointing at where you're looking at it in the Scopes the next tool that we want to use may seem very basic but is hugely important and that's called our balance adjustment also known as white balance but we're approaching it slightly different than normal here in a perfect world you can set your white balance using something white or gray in the scene or they will have just nailed it on set but if we don't have something white or gray in the scene or even if we do and for some reason it still just isn't turning out right we can actually set our balance for the skin tones of the scene instead there are two main ways that I like to set balance One is using the temperature and tint sliders so I'll adjust for warm and cool as well as between green and magenta until I see my skin tones line up on that skin tone line in the vector scope the other way is by using the color wheels specifically the offset color wheel which will change the color of the entire image so I'll grab the controller in the offset wheel and I'll move it in the direction that I want my blob in the vector scope to move in general as long as you've got an image that isn't actually supposed to be mostly one color moving your blob closer to the middle is a great way to balance your image but on top of this if you've also got some skin tone in the scene you can keep an eye on where the that lens as a great reference for when you've got it right by doing this first and starting with a solid balance on your image you're taking out so much of the headache that you would run into later in the process with the other more fine-tuning kind of tools but sometimes just setting your balance isn't enough for example if your subject is in an area with a lot of plants they may have a green cast on their skin but when we correct for that in the balance phase the background might look a little off now this is when we might want to dig into some more tools like the Hue versus Hue Hue versus saturation and Hue versus luminance Curves in resolve you can find these in your curves panel at the top of the panel right beside the typical curve control the Hue versus Hue will allow us to alter a specific color in our image without affecting other colors so what we can do is by choosing the Hue versus Hue tool and then selecting our qualifier in our viewer and clicking on the area of the skin that we want to change it will create a selection in our curve Now by dragging up or down on that selection we can alter that color so if we've got a slightly green or yellow part of the skin I can click on that area and then shift the Hue slightly while protecting the other areas that are more green I often like to use this tool to even out my skin tones a little bit between the more yellowy skin tones and the more red ones one thing that you may want to be careful of when you're doing this though is not making your skin and your lips too close to the same color because it can get rid of some of the life in your subject but again this will be dependent on who's in frame the Hue versus saturation will allow us to choose a specific color again and increase or decrease the saturation so again you can just use the qualifier to click and then drag up to increase or down to decrease and the Hue versus luminance will do the same thing but allow us to increase or decrease the brightness of that color so with these three tools you can really get in there and dial in the skin tone to what you want without affecting any of the other colors in the rest of the image that much that being said if there is anything else in your image that's the same color or a similar color range to your skin like a beige wall or some Autumn Leaves this is going to affect those things as well unless you use a mask or what they call power windows in DaVinci Resolve around the area that you want to affect if you need even finer control than what you got with the Hue saturation and luminance curves there is a similar option in DaVinci Resolve called the color warper this tool works very similarly to the curves that we just talked about but on top of selecting a color range we can also select only a specific saturation range to work with as well so if your skin is in that kind of orange range but it's less saturated than the autumn leaves in the background or any other orange object effects in the image you may be able to alter it without affecting those other objects in the color warper window we have an option to choose how granular we get by selecting the amount of lines in our graph as well as how many points they have on each line and this works visually basically the same way that the vector scope does with the colors going around and the saturation going from the middle to the outside and you may even notice that there is a skin tone indicator on there as well so if I hover my qualifier over the skin in the viewer and then click it it will select a specific color and saturation point on the color warper to start affecting if I drag that point around the circle it'll change the Hue or the color and if I drag it in or out it'll affect the saturation now you'll notice that it does pull other points on that same line along with it but if we want we can actually choose to pin certain points with the pin tool after we've pinned something it will no longer be affected when we move the other points one of the things that I really they like to do with this tool is to pull in the lines closest to the skin tone line a little bit I find that I get a much more flattering tone without as much variance between the yellow and red sections of skin that being said again you want to be careful of how much you do this and how much you're affecting things like the lips that give life to the face there should be some kind of difference between your skin tone and your lip tone now I want to give a quick warning the next method can be super powerful for both dialing in or enhancing your skin tones as well as for preserving your skin tones while dialing in your total look but with great power comes great responsibility because this can also make your image look really unrealistic if you take it too far first things first we're going to set up a layer node this isn't technically 100 necessary but you'll see why it's handy in a second to do this let's create a node with option or alt s and then use option or alt L to create the layer mixer as as well as another node in our layer stack now what's important to know is that the node on the bottom is the boss here I can do anything I want to that top node and it won't even show up as long as that bottom node is enabled so next what we want to do is choose that bottom node and open up the qualifier panel then click somewhere on the skin with our qualifier right off the bat it won't look like anything happened at all but if we hit shift H or use the highlight button to go into highlight mode which shows just what's happening on that one node you'll see that now the only parts of the image that are showing are the parts that have a similar Hue saturation and luminance to the part where we clicked so for the most part this should be mostly skin tones back in that qualifier panel we can dial this in a bit further by decreasing the width of our Hue adjusting the saturation and our luminance until we've got mostly only the skin tone left showing in our frame then to soften things out you can denoise the select as well over on the right side panel if you want to get even more selective we can also add a power window as well so that it disregards all of the other parts of the frame except where we know our skin is going to be now that we have our selection we can hit shift H again to leave highlight mode and anything that we do on this node specifically will only affect the areas that we could still see when we were in highlight mode so we could add a little bit of saturation into the skin here or if we wanted to make it a bit brighter we could move up the gamma a little bit and it's only going to touch the skin tones because that's what we made that node effect but let's say that we already were really happy with our skin tone and all we wanted to do was use this node to protect it we can choose the node on top of our layer stack and make some changes to the look but you'll notice that the skin doesn't change at all so remember how I said earlier that the bottom node of our little stack there is the boss that's all that's actually showing up in that bottom note is whatever we had from our qualifier so everything else is now showing from the top node so now we can add a look onto that top node without affecting our skin again this is easy to go way too far with this so please be careful with it but it's a nice way to add contrast between your skin tone and the rest of the scene while protecting those skin tones that you worked so hard on another thing that I like to do with this method is that if I have a bit of a look up on that top node and it's obviously not affecting the skin tone at all sometimes that can look a little bit weird that you know that color or whatever is not touching the skin so what I'll do is Select that bottom node that has our skin selection on it and I'll use the key tool to dial back the key output a bit if I set it to 0.5 it'll protect the skin but only at about 50 percent of the intensity this can look a bit more natural if you're using this method to add a more intense look to your scene so now that you know how to use the vector scope to make sure that your skin is the right color regardless of your eyes or your monitor and then you have balancing hsl curves color warper and using qualifiers to dial in and protect your skin I want to give you some advice on how you should approach these ideally first and foremost keep an eye on that Vector scope often bottom line but beyond that I put the order of the tools in this video in the order that I personally think you should use them to get the effect that you're looking for balancing is a much broader tool than hsl curves and then the tools just get more and more specific from there if there's something that you can do with a broader tool generally it's good practice to try it that way first before you move on to the more fine tuning that being said combining these tools on different layers or nodes is a great way to start with a broader brush and then fine tune as you go using the tool with the most chance of messing something up in the smallest and least harmful way because if you get most of the way there with balance you're only doing Minor Adjustments with the other tools and the bonus to all of this is that while we were definitely talking about skin tones for this video these tools can be used for all sorts of things so you actually learned a lot more in this video than you came here for so you definitely want to go have some fun with those tools and if you want a more holistic look at how I use some of these tools check out this video here and if you got something out of this video make sure to share it on your social media so that others can check it out too thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Dunna Did It

Views: 23,071

Keywords: dunna did it, color correction, color grade, color grading, color grading davinci resolve, color grading perfect skin tones, color grading tutorial, davinci resolve, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve studio, davinci resolve tutorial, denver riddle, dunna did it color grade, dunna did it davinci, dunna did it davinci resolve, how to color grade skin tones, perfect skin tones, premiere pro, premiere pro tutorial, skin tone, skin tones, skin tones in premiere pro

Id: vUQ_3fJVz-c

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023