Skin tones and Skin Refining in DaVinci Resolve 17 (free public version)

hello everyone today i will show you how to improve skin tones in davinci resolve 17. the ability to improve skin tones is one of the most important skills for the colorists so today i will show you not only how to improve skin tones and lighting but also how to make skin look smooth and simply beautiful we will be turning this shot into this one and also we will be using a free version of davinci resolve 17 because i want to make it accessible for everyone let's start [Music] okay guys so i'm already in the color tab in davinci resolve 17 and i have my clip here i got it from wicked winters films and if you are interested i will leave you a link to their youtube channel below and we will start from creating a note graph it will be very simple we will be working only with serial notes so i will relabel my first note it will be my contrast then i will hit option s to create another serial note and it will be my saturation then we will have our skin tones then highlights my next note will be called skin softening and at the end i will put my favorite vignette okay so let's click on the first note and let's start from increasing the contrast here i'll go up to about 1 350. then i will also push my lift down a bit and then my gain up and then my gamma down just a touch and this is before and after looking good then i will move to my saturation note and i will increase the saturation up to 60 just to add a little bit more colors to the clip we don't need much because the background is quite neutral and we will be working on skin tone separately so this is before and after and now we can see that her face is very pale i want to add some life to it to make it look healthy and natural so i'll click on my next note and first i'll go to my power windows i will grab round power window and i'll place it over the face then i'll expand it and i will soften it in order to get a better selection all right this will work and now i will go to my qualifier and i will work with the hue saturation and lightness at the same time so i won't change here anything and then i will select the part of the skin and let's turn the highlight on and let's see how the selection looks like okay looks quite good it caught a bit of her but in this case it's fine so i will just soften my selection here a bit and i will denoise it okay let's turn off the highlight and let's go to the color warper and let's work directly on the clip so i will just move my cursor around her face in order to find the tone i want we can go really crazy here as you can see so let's make sure that we do only a small adjustment remember less is always more so i'll try to find a very natural tone not moving my cursor too much right about here looks good and this is before and after a huge difference the color warper is one of my favorite tools at the moment i just love how precise it is and now i will show you how we can sculpt the face a bit more how we can manipulate highlights so i will click on the next note i will turn on my highlight and i will go to the qualifier again and this time we will be working only with luminance because we want to qualify only the brightest parts of the clip so i will use this slider here i will move it up around here and then the other side to the left and then i will soften my selection i will denoise it as well and then you can see that it cut quite a lot of the background so to make my selection more precise i will grab a power window again and i will place it over her face all right this should work and now i will turn my highlight off and i will go to the primary bars and here i will lift my gain up maybe to around 15. and let's turn the power window off to be able to see and this is before and after so now her face is much more defined not as flat as it was before and now i obviously have to drag it backwards and forwards alright now i will zoom in a bit so you can see better so her face looks actually very nice there's no blemishes to remove but we can always make it look a little bit smoother so what we can actually do is we can copy the selection from our skin tones note by clicking command c and we can paste it onto our skin softening node by clicking command v but then we've also applied what we did with the color warper as well so to remove it we just have to go here and clear it by hitting this button all right and now with our skin selected we can go to midtones details and we will decrease it to around minus 50. this is the maximum i would go for because if we use too much for example if we go to minus 100 the face looks very fake like the amateur photoshop work and this is what we really want to avoid so let's go to -50 again and let's have a look before and after skin looks much softer than before let's zoom out and let's track it again i even think that -50 is a bit too much so let's go to around -35 in this case it's definitely enough so let's see again before and after and now i actually have one more idea i will show you how to enhance the eyes so i will move my notes here and i will add another note i will call it eyes and now i will draw a mask around the eyes so i'll go to my power windows i will grab custom power window let's zoom in and let's draw a mask around the eyes it doesn't have to be perfect okay now let's soften it inside and outside let's zoom out and let's hide the power window and we will go back to our primary wheels and first we will increase mid tones in order to lighten the eyes not too much just a little bit and this is before and after let's soften the mask a bit more and now let's go to blur and here we will sharpen the eyes by decreasing the blur radius so again we can't go too far with it it will look very bad but we can go down to around 0.42 alright so the eyes look sharper now and this is before and after and let's track it all right so this is another thing that could be useful for you and now to bring even more attention to the talent let's put a vignette around her i will grab a round power window again i will expand it and soften it like this then i will push my mid tones down to around minus 0.15 and the clip got very dark but don't worry we just have to reverse the mask here and let's see before and after the whole shot looks much more defined and now let's see before and after full screen thanks so much for watching my videos guys i hope that you like them if you do hit subscribe and feel free to message me with any questions see you soon

Channel: Color Grading Insights

Views: 8,613

Keywords: color grading, color correction, fil;m editing, cinematic look, cinematic footage, skin tones, improving skin tones, blackmagic ursa, color warper, color wheels, color curves, davinci resolve 17, model video, hot to colorgrade, film colorist, filmmaking, youtube channel, beautiful woman, short film, film editing, adobe premiere, adobe after effects, film looks, lut, masking, compositing, movie film, how to achieve cinamtic look, social video, filmmaking tips, scopes, rgb

Id: VP6Y9-_YAaQ

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021