My secret to CINEMATIC COLOURS - BEST SKINTONES for S-Log3

what if i told you that you can get arri alexa like color performance on your sony camera with just a simple click [Music] what's up youtube my name is joe crafford and i'm a commercial filmmaker from sunny south africa the only thing i possibly love more than for making is talking about it so i've decided to invest some more energy into this platform we all learn so much from if you're keen to see what i get up to hit the subscribe button and follow along my journey we live in a very exciting age cameras have become smaller and cheaper and getting cinematic images have never been easier with the likes of the sony a7h3 opening new doors with incredible dynamic range performance that rivals the highest end of cinema cameras so in this video i'm going to share my secret in color grading and how i get the best skin tones out of cameras like the a7 s3 the fx3 and the fx6 a while back i stumbled onto a guy named joel familaro a talented dp based in australia joel owns both re and sony cameras and his passion to recreate colors have led him to create the phantom lights up until this moment i've moved away from using one click luts and lean more towards creating my own look from scratch using color space transform it's only after i tried it that i became a believer what these luts do is basically convert your slog 3 footage into a finished look emulating the aria alexa and various other film looks when i say finished look i mean damn near complete the only thing i'm going to share with you today is how to refine your footage after the light is applied but first let's just reaffirm that shooting s-lock 3 is super easy on these cameras with a one button gamma assist on an a7 s3 and fx3 or a custom light on the fx6 it's no longer necessary to overexpose in any way and you simply don't have to stare at a flat image anymore now let's jump into post okay we're gonna do this in davinci but if you don't have resolve please don't run away just yet you can do exactly the same in adobe premiere pro and final cut and it's nothing special yet it's basically just a few tweaks and it can make a massive difference in your final image so i've got a few examples over here we've got this one shot on the fx3 and from the same shoot also fx3 the freedom of movement video and one more we'll do just this one quickly and a7s3 definitely one of my favorite shoots and fx6 so the reason i'm showing you this is because these luts are quite diverse and you can use them throughout the bank a7s fx3 fx6 probably fx9 i haven't tried that but i will do that soon so in all of these examples i'm just going to share two steps with you and that is going to give you an overall beautiful image and better skin tones so the first step is highly dependent on your in-camera accuracy and the way you shoot the footage and it's all about white balance now white balance is not important white balance is everything i can't stress this enough i meet way too many people who think white balance is simply just a temperature slider or a thin slider that you adjust in the end to get your footage looking better but it's not white balance is everything it's color if you want better colors from your camera you have to try and nail the white balance in camera unless you're shooting raw but even then it's it's good to try and nail it in camera and then also knowing how to treat it in post to get the best white balance out of your image so we'll start with this example over here now as you can see there's a lot of trees over here a lot of greenery and the sun's bouncing off the trees over here and it's just green cast all over so in this image i had a lot of trouble with the skin tone so what i'm going to do is just this is the final image i'm going to go to the s-log image this one is ungraded so let's just find our hero frame right about there okay go into the color tab so nothing has been done yet step one not the main step but the easy one is just to apply the lut so we've got it over here joel farm and neutral that's my favorite lut the one i use the most but you can play around with them it all just depends on your lighting and again like i said white balance so like i mentioned we've got sun coming in here bouncing the green all over and we've got green skin tones green in the black i can see it with my eye but you don't want to trust your eye you want to trust the waveform so over here i can see there's a lack of red and that's definitely in the black and and the darker parts of the image and over here there's some issues and also we've got some highlights up there you can see there's a disconnect so the first step is just to try and correct this okay so i usually create an extra node for this you can label it so you can say node label white balance exposure that's usually the tab i use for and i'm just going to do some basic adjustments over here so over there the red i can see it needs to be fixed it's down here in the blacks just going to push it up a little bit and i'm going to try and fix that over there so just bringing the blue down a little bit pushing up the red and there already that's a big difference okay if you look at just that there's a that's a massive difference it's already a lot better but you can still improve it it's not perfect so the next step to getting better skin tones with the white balance is actually i use a mask okay and i'm gonna use the skin tone indicator which is again not wanna trust your eye i'm just gonna focus on the skin over here i'm gonna mask this image and over there you can see that's the only area that i'm isolating and if i isolate it let's go to the vectorscope and if i isolate it you can already see there we go so it's not perfectly on the line and basically there's a little bit too much green because your green and yellow channels over here and your red and magentas over there so i'm just gonna push it a little bit more forward okay so a little bit green i can take the green out and yeah that's pretty much on there okay and now if we remove this mask there we go that's a really decent image but we're not there yet okay so this was the first step i took it from this green not accurate white balance to this okay and now for step two and this is probably the most important step in getting the best skin tones because if you have correct white balance in camera this is still the step that you're gonna do every single time so my favorite tool in grading is always gonna be the qualifier okay premiere pro calls at the hsl secondary doesn't matter what it's called it works with hsl which is huge saturation and luminance okay and basically by selecting a specific color with this color picker over here in this case we're going to select the skin tone we can see something happened over there we're going to use these values to actually key out the specific color we want and then we can do literally anything we want to that color now it's not just about color we've got luminance as well so luminance is you can literally drop the highlights in the background by just selecting it and focusing on the luminosity values so before we carry on with the skin tones i actually want to show you that so in the original grade you can see over here right over there if we disable this you can see how the highlights are bringing down but it's only affecting a specific area it's only affecting really bright parts okay and if we select it you can see over here this was using the qualifier and right over there the moment we slide it we can see the rest of the image coming in and just right about there now i know i'm only going to affect those areas and i was able to bring down the highlight so if we go to the waveform and bring it down let's just do this you can see how it's dropping down without affecting the rest of the image now this same principle applies to skin tones so i'm going to focus on the skin tone now and let's just find our euroframe it's more or less it was about yeah and yeah keying it out is tricky sometimes it depends on the color in your scene sometimes it can't take quite long i know this one was tricky so what i usually do is i try and key it out as best i can okay in this case i'm just gonna have to try and take that pink out over there i can play with this just move it a slight bit around and then i can try and denoise it but right now the green is selected so definitely don't want any green in the image we're getting a better result already now this is not a perfect selection yet because if you go to the first start of the frame if you go to the beginning of the frame you can see here's the challenge we've got this brown handbag the shoes and everything it's just a little bit too close to her skin tones okay so for me to get that i'm not even just going to get that with this hsl selector i'm going to have to mask that but what i want to focus on is not how to do the masking or how to do the selection but what are you going to do with the selection so first i'm going to go to the frame where i already did all of this so over here you can see right over there it's only the skin tone that's being selected and the handbag and everything is not in the frame as it goes up and it's basically just a mask and some 3d tracking there we go three tracking love it davinci premiere can do this also and final cut but davinci is just that extra step a little bit better with it okay so like i said it's not about how to select it but about what you're going to do with the selection and the magic ingredient over here is just always going to be your midtones okay so all i'm going to do is i'm just going to boost the midtones now this is a subtle difference i'm going to show you better examples but if you boost the mid tones just the luminosity that is what's going to make your skin tones pop so the difference from this this is before after before after i love this a lot more okay it just gives it that subtle pop and just makes your skin tones better so i'm going to show you another example okay so we've got this awesome frame over here i'm going to do step one first well the step before step one is just applying the light really easy neutral so this shot's quite underexposed but luckily we've got that beautiful thin bit codec and we can push it and like we see it's step one it's just going to get a better white balance but right off the bat i'm going to boost the midtones just to get a bit better exposure and if we open our waveform over here we can see there's some discrepancies over here so i'm just going to do a quick correction it's going to be bringing the red and the highlights down pushing a little bit of blue in the mid tones actually red as well and then over here i want to try and correct that a little bit more so let's see if we take some green out there we go that's a big difference so you can fine tune this again now we have to adapt the greens here at the bottom that already looks a lot better so if we do the before and after you can see how the color changes but with that boosted exposure you also get a better skin tone okay and then we can take it a step further by selecting the face the skin tone and just boosting up the exposure which i did in the previous example so just going to show you over here so if we just find the error frame right over there that's really nice now here's the skin tone you can see we've got it selected over there and there's the boost in exposure and that's gonna be the magic okay so full screen disable enable disable enable i really really like that just that subtle pop just everything that looks better and if we go now and if we want to make sure that it's actually correct on the flash line we can select this and check the vector scope and you can see it's right on the money so it's not just about popping the skin tones but it's also about correcting the skin tone so if the skin tone was off you can actually play around with the chair so hopefully that makes a little bit more sense we're going to do a few more examples this shot is actually one of my favorite shots in the film but it was really a challenge to get the right color over here main reason being it was already in the shade the sun was behind the mountain but there's all this green over here so just sitting natural light it was quite a trick the after image looks fine but if you see that before you'll know what i mean so first we're at the lut do joel fam neutral there we go and here you can see the challenge there's so much wrong with this image it's underexposed if we do the waveform you can see it's underexposed there's it's green it's blue it's it's everything you can see over there the waveform is just screaming at us so we're going to do some corrections over here sometimes when an image is this much off i actually do fix it a little bit in the green or the the temperature slider but i'd prefer to stick to these tools to get so i have fine control over the highlights the mid tones and shadows as these ones are a little bit more universal and affects the overall image and you don't always want to do that so in this case i'm just going to go magenta as i do that you'll see it's just overall getting a little bit better and more balanced not too much probably just going to keep it at 40 and there is i'm going to do manual so i'll start with the middles just to get that exposure a little better even highlights that also helps with the exposure and i'll crush the blacksmith a little bit over there cool now let's do the colors so we've got highlights over here we've got some low lights there's a lack of red in the image there's too much green in the midtones and i'm just going to try my best to correct that and if i don't get it perfect we can just jump to the one that's already done and you can see the difference so that's gonna make that push the reds in a little bit not too much we have to retain some of that blue also take some of the green out there we go that's not perfect yet but it's close okay as you can see it's not perfect because in the final image i did quite a few tweaks i actually desaturated the greens as well you can see it's happening from there to there because i like it i like the saturate desaturating my greens and i also did a few minor adjustments i made the jacket a little bit more saturated and i did a tweak on a skin tone over here like the thing i said earlier before after before after again that's just the magic so yeah you can take it a lot further if you wish but if you get this right where you just get it from here to there you're already on the right direction okay going on we're going to do this next one from the a7s3 and yeah just in love with the skin tones over here i don't even think it's necessary to tweak the skin tones so let's start over here with the raw one let's make some notes create a luts gel formula neutral so again i can see it's a little green i can see it's off but you don't want to use your eye you want to use the indicator over here and the waveforms okay so i'm not going to actually correct it i'm just going to show you where i already did that and this is the before and after before after and that's it that's it i didn't even have to do step two here because the skin tones was already according to my liking and it just shows you how important step one is so if you don't get it right in camera there are many variables why people get it wrong often it's not just possible to get it right 100 because of color cost the green coming in over here it just depends on a few variables but if you can get it close it's just going to make your life a lot easier with that being said i'm going to show you this example shot on fx6 and this is a prime example of where if you get the shot right and just applying the lut you're pretty much home so i'm going to apply the light gel farm neutral that's really close the only thing i'm going to do here is just drop down the blacks right about there that's my indicating line that i put for myself over there not too much just round about there and if i play it back that's pretty freaking awesome that's pretty awesome okay but i'll take it one step further nothing relating to the color i'll just bring down the highlights a little bit over there by using a mask and and that's gonna be with hsl so it's hsl selecting the highlights just going over there and kind of just making sure i don't select everything i can actually select all the colors because when you use luminosity values you can include all the colors and that's where you by just decreasing the blacks over you you can only include the specific luminosity value you want to change so this is just an example i can clean it up but i'm not going to you can bring down the highlights a little bit you see extremes okay you can bring it down a little bit and then also in this case i'll probably add some saturation so if you go before after before after it's not perfectly keyed as you can see there's some issues over there but in the final example that i already that you'll see before after perfectly keyed so yeah that's it it's really just about fine tuning your white balance that's your first step most important step once that's done adding that extra pop to your skin tones like a little bit on the face over here like we did over here there we can see it pop much better and also this big improvement over here it's just that pop to the face if you do this and you make sure that your skin tone indicator is spot on with your vector scope you're going to win every single time and there you have it if you want to maximize your dynamic range by shooting in slot 3 but still do a quick turnaround there's simply no better way than going with the phantom lights check out the link below and save yourself 20 by using my promo code also let me know in the comments what you want me to share in the future thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Jacques Crafford

Views: 41,031

Keywords: Cinematic Colour Grading, Cinematic Colours, Cinematic Colors, Cinematic Color Grading, Grading S-log3, How to colour grade S-log3, How to color grade S-log3, How to colour grade slog3, slog3 in davinci resolve, Best Skintones for S-Log3

Id: mTOYQ11JJzo

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021