Simple workflow for perfect skin tones | DaVinci Resolve tutorial

[Music] welcome my name is avery and in this tutorial i'll be sharing with you my skin tone workflow this is a powerful technique that not only gives you full control over your skin tones but it works with virtually any shot you throw at it so let's go ahead and get started first off how do we think about skin tones as a colorist I like to break it into three components the shadows the mid-tones and the highlights and each of these components plays an important role in the skin tones look the mid-tones are where we add our base orange color and this is actually going to be the same orange hue regardless of your actors ethnicity or the rest of the color grade for the shadows we're going to add a little bit of a red color and this will give the appearance of blood flow in the skin this is a great way to control how lifelike or how dull your skin tones look depending on how much of this red color you add it's important to note here that the shadows and mid-tones are going to remain pretty much the same color regardless of what you're doing with the color grade and that's where the highlights come in the highlights of the skin should take on the ambient light color in the scene so in this example I'm working with a teal orange color grade and I have lots of blue ambient light in this shot so I'm gonna add blue in to my highlights and you can see right away how it makes the skin look like it's part of that actual shot but at the same time it keeps our mid-tones and our shadows looking very lifelike and natural what's so powerful about this technique is that all we have to do is change the color of our highlights to fit in whatever color grade we're using for that specific shot so let me show you how to set this all up inside the Vinci resolve here's our shot and we need to color correct this footage before we start working with our skin tones I'll take my a saturation down to zero and I'll balance my luminance first so I'll use the curves here set my black point on the scopes and get a little bit of contrast going in this image I'll bring my saturation back up to 50 and then go to the RGB mixer page and turn up the red green and blue output and that just saturates our image nicely so now I'll add a second and take care of some of the color cast issues it seems like we have some red in the shadows so I'll go to the primary bars turn the luminance mix down to zero and I'll start to bring some red out of the lift okay that looks about right I can also bring some green out of the mid-tones there great so that looks good there's before and there's after now we're ready to start working with the skin so I'll add a new node and we're gonna go ahead and qualify our skin tones I'll grab the eyedropper tool and select our skin you can hit shift H to show your selection just gonna select those mid tone colors right there and then grab the feather tool and drag across the skin to blend our selection and chances are you'll probably have to refine this a little bit by hand so I'll go ahead and do that now perfect so that's looking nice and I want to point out that it's okay if you select other things in the scene because chances are they will benefit from this skin tone process so let's start working on our skin tones I'm gonna come over here to the log wheels and as you can tell we have a shadow mid-tone and highlight wheel which correspond perfectly to the technique that we'll be using to control our skin tones I'm also going to switch over from the parade to the vectorscope and one thing I want to point out is that if you click this button right here you want to make sure that the show skin tone indicator is checked that will give you this line and that's what we're going to be aligning our mid-tones to to make sure that our skin is the correct color so I'll grab a power window circular power window in this case and I'll just go ahead and kind of select my skin like that and now if we look on the vectorscope we can see where our skin is and in this case it's right directly on that line now if it's not on the line you can use the offset wheel to just make some subtle adjustments and get your skin either right on this line or just touching the right side of the line so maybe I'll make a very subtle correction there now what I can do is take our mid-tones and I can push that color into the mids okay and I'm keeping a close eye on the vectorscope to make sure I'm pushing the right color right about there looks good and at this point I can shut off the power window now if you look underneath the color wheels here we have a low range and a high range parameter right here and I'll show you how that works visually right now so first thing I'm going to do is set my low range and I'm gonna do this by pulling it all the way down to zero and essentially what this does is it allows our mid-tone color to extend all the way down into our shadows so you can see our shadows are really taking on that orange color so I'll bring my low range back up slowly so we're we're basically just confining this orange color to our mid-tones and right around there looks about right so 0.244 and then I can do the same process with the highlights I'll bring the high range up to one or a hundred percent and you can see that orange color is now coming into the highlights so I'll begin to bring this down again trying to get our mid-tone range correct perfect now we can begin adding life into the skin by pushing some red into the shadows and I'll say right away that a little bit goes a long way with this so I'll push some red in there that looks nice and if you want to you can even take the luminance down just ever so slightly okay again it takes very very little here you can even go and fine-tune your low range at this point to kind of get the balance between the red and orange tones correct so right around there looks correct to me the next thing we can do is balance out our highlights our highlights look pretty close in this case but I might want to add just a little bit of blue to them so go ahead and push this towards kind of a blue cyan color and it's very subtle but I think that's all we need so let's go ahead and add another node here and I'm gonna begin doing my color grade right now so I first like to work with the luminance just like when I color correct so I'll take my saturation down to zero and I'll just go ahead and kind of be darken this down a little bit it was slight boost to my highlights and there we go that looks pretty nice now we'll begin to bring some color back into the shots and that looks good right around there and for this I'll do just a standard teal orange grade so let's go and add a new node and then I'm gonna start to add that teal color and I like to do this using the curves so I'll bring the red down just like that then and the blue curve I will add just a little bit of blue into the shadows there we go that looks nice and I'm gonna bring the blue out of the mid-tones and highlights okay so we just have a little bit of blue and the shadows but nowhere else then I'll go to my green curve and add a little bit of green into the highlights there we go and then I'm gonna take the green out of the shadows so there we go now our teal color looks really nice but one problem you can see right away is that it's completely washing out our skin tones so how do we bring our skin back well actually it's really easy what I can do is hit Alt L which will add a layer node so essentially this node right here is being layered on top of our teal node so all I need to do is select my skin here and my original skin tones will be layered on top of my grated image so we can come over here to where we first qualified the skin and we can connect to these little triangular tabs and this will essentially pass the qualification from one node to the next now you can see by default the node is coming in inverted so if I go to the key tab and click the invert button right here now we're back to original selection so if I come back to the main view now you can see that our original skin tones are being layered on top of our teal look now all we have to do are two quick steps to blend our skin in with this grade the first thing I'll do is take my gain all the way down to zero and then I'll slowly bring it up to where the mid-tone and shadow colors balance nicely with this parade bring this up just a little bit right around there looks pretty nice right around point six in this case we're working with a lot of blue ambient light so I'm gonna use the gain wheel right here to add some blue color into our highlights and help blend our skin so I'll go ahead and add a little bit of that blueish cyan color to the highlights that's looking nice and as you can see it's washing out our skin tones just a little bit so I can undo that correction in the gamma by pushing the opposite color push a little bit of orange there and there we go now we're getting those nice blue highlights that help blend our skin with the rest of the shot but our mid-tones and shadows are still that really nice natural rich skin color finally let me show you the real power of this technique let's say your director comes in and says you know what I've seen the teal grade a bunch let's do something different so you go ahead you take your teal grade and delete it and I'll go ahead and reset my skin node real quick - so I'll take my game down to zero and then I'll reset my gamma and my gain wheels and let's say your director says you know what I want to create a very green cast image with some warm golden highlights so we can come over here to this note where we originally created the teal look and we can start to create this new grade so I'll add in kind of a yellow-green color into the gamma in the mid-tones had maybe just a little bit of cyan into the shadows just ever so slightly and then I'll add a nice rich warm kind of golden yellow color into the game okay so obviously as you can see it's a very different look but like before our skin tones are kind of being washed out by the grade not as bad as the last example but we still want to bring back our skin so I'll go ahead and just like before I'll select my skin node and start slowly bringing up the game and zoom in a little more here slowly bring up the gain to where the mid-tones and the shadows right here in the cheek look correct so right around there finally all we have to do is adjust the highlights to match the ambient color of this great so I'm going to take our gain wheel and start to push a little bit of that same golden yellow color into the highs there we go that's looking really nice and if I want to I can again sort of cancel that correction out in the Gamma so in this case I'll push this a little bit towards kind of a cyan blue and there we go not only it does this method give you full control over your skin tones but it's also extremely versatile which is why I use it all the time now before I sign off I want to give a big thank you to everyone who's helped us break the thousand subscriber milestone at the beginning of December we were a little over 800 subscribers and now already as of January 1st we've broken 1200 that's a 50% growth in just one month and I can't say enough how rewarding it is to not only see people subscribing but to read your comments your feedback to see people sharing these videos and to watch a small community start to form around this channel I want to thank everyone for being a crucial part of helping this channel grow so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial my name is avery Peck happy New Year to everyone and I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Avery Peck

Views: 588,973

Keywords: Skin tone grading, color grading, color correction, DaVinci resolve, teal orange look, skin tone tutorial, hollywood look, skin tone workflow, resolve 14, filmic look, cinema camera, log grading, juan melara

Id: HcFPJOLTFP0

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TangibleDifference]

Nice clear explanation and great looking grade! I’m going to try this out on my next project. One question - why did you turn up the red, green and blue outputs in the RGB mixer page? Does that have the same effect as increasing saturation?

One comment - I found the highly thematic music throughout the whole video a bit distracting.

[u/uniqueoriginalname]

Aaand this is why we pay colourists. This is the video I will show clients who don't want to pay for a colourist because "why do we need one anyway"

[u/AliceInSlaughterland]

What do you recommend for dark skin tones?

[u/Sevmaster]

Really great tutorial, helped me a lot. You got a new subscriber on your channel!

[u/cut-it]

Really good video - thank you