The Simplest Way to Perfect Skin Tones

we all want our skin tones to look beautiful and creamy we want her talent to look as best and as beautiful as they can but that can be a challenge sometimes and if that's something that you're struggling with I know how you feel so my goal is to help you to get natural perfect looking skin tones with my secret method that has proven to remove the guesswork so that your results are spot-on [Music] now the thing is what makes perfect looking skin tones well the way we'll want to define that engage how we're doing is by looking at their luma hue and saturation and the easiest way to do that is with the video scopes now it doesn't matter if you're using Adobe Premiere DaVinci Resolve or File Cut Pro 10 the first trick in getting perfect skin tones is to isolate the skin with a shape mask so that we can see only those values in the video scopes and all three programs will do that armed with that information will then know what Corrections to make and how to get the skin tones to be beautiful now before diving deeper into this powerful method let's review what the idle values are for luma hue and saturation for skin because these matter starting with the lumen or the exposure of the skin looking at the waveform we want our skin tones to be in the forty to seventy Ayari range that is this range here in the scopes ideally the skin tones will cover this entire range from the shadowy areas of the skin to the highlights of the skin that are directly exposed by the light now of course there are exceptions depending on if you're working on a scene that is supposed to be almost pitch black like a horror film with some kind of ghost or monster roaming around through the shadows then yes we will be below this range the next thing to consider is the hue of our skin when evaluating skin hue the vectorscope is our best friend I always like to have the flesh line or the eye bar turned on and this is where the trace for the skin should generally lie however depending upon the complexion or the ethnicity of the person there can be just a slight variation but for the most part we all have the same color of skin next comes saturation again we use the vectorscope as our guide the further the trace extends from the center the more saturation our skin has so how much is the right amount of saturation for skin well this also depends on the complexion of our subject for pale skin tones the trace should extend out between 20 and 30% away from the center for medium or dark complexions it'll be between 21 five to forty five percent and four golden skin tones which are often people of Asian descent and can be arranged between thirty five to fifty percent let's apply this method to some skin tones we'll start first in resolve here we have a guy in a suit talking on a cell phone it's a nice close-up with lots of skin now it's hard to look at this entire shot and to know what we need to do for the skin so the simplest way to perfect the skin tones is to draw a power window or a shape mask around them to isolate just them in the video scopes I'm taking my time to avoid the eyes lips and anything else that could be a distraction in the video scopes now let's enable the highlight feature and voila we can now only see the skin tones in our scopes looking in the luma waveform the trace for the skin is mainly in the thirty to sixty IRA range that's not bad considering he's in the shade so I think we can improve the exposure a little so we'll bring up the gamma a bit which is primarily where the skin tones lie now for the hue let's take a look at the vectorscope you can see a skin is a little on the red side compared to the flesh line now you might be thinking we need to set a complex key qualifier and isolate the skin but instead I'm going to show you an even easier and faster way to fix the hue of the skin by going to the Huber's hue curve and with the eyedropper tool we'll isolate the hues of the skin by clicking on them and then we'll drag the middle point down this swings the trace until it lines up more evenly on the line that's better but what's still bothering me is I think that there's a lot of skin tones that are still leaning towards red that's likely due to the redness in his nose so to address that well simply widen the range and move those red and magenta tones closer to the flesh line of course people's skin tones are never even and that's okay but this method can make those imperfections less obvious and you can kind of think of it like adding makeup to our talent and that makes you a hero finally for the saturation I would say that the trace extends around 40% from the center of the vectorscope and if you remember I said for PAL complexions they should be between 20 to 30% so let's remove some of that extra color by going to the Hoover sack curve placing a point on the skin with the eyedropper and dragging down on the middle point to remove some of that color alright it's time to see the results I'll disable the highlight feature and then the window and let's take a look at the before and after you can see how dark and reddish his skin was and now how they look much more pleasing and natural now for our next shot in Premiere Pro we'll use an opacity mask to isolate this guy's skin in terms of exposure I would say we are pretty good from 30 to 70 Ayari but what we really need to work on is the hue of the skin which we can see is leaning towards yellow in the vectorscope I often times will see this when people are near a window and there is green grass or foliage on the outside that is tinting the skin towards green so to correct for this we'll use the hue vers hue curve will isolate the skin tones with the eyedropper and drag the middle point up until the trace aligns better with the flesh line in terms of saturation we are around 30% from the center which falls in the 25 to 40% range for dark skin tones so we're good on the saturation now I'll disable the mask and take a look at the before and after be a beautiful that's a huge improvement look how green the skin tones were before our correction he was looking sickly and now we've returned him to optimum health so just remember that grass and foliage can tint our skin tones green next let's jump to Final Cut Pro 10 to isolate the skin we'll use the draw mask effect and draw a mask avoiding the lips and eyes for luma the trace corresponding to the skin tones begins at 10 re and goes up to 65 Ayari but the bulk of the trace is lower so I think it could use a boost in exposure we'll add a color wheels effect and bring the mid-tones up a bit in terms of the hue the traces on the right side of the flesh line meaning it is too red or magenta so we'll add a hue/saturation curves effect isolate the skin with the eyedropper in the humours hue curve and drag the middle point down leaning it towards yellow and till the trace aligns with the flesh line finally golden skin tones should be around thirty five to fifty percent from the center so with the Huber sack curve I'll give a small boost to the saturation now let's see the before and after right on point all right these kinds of Corrections may seem subtle at first but they do make the difference in setting your films apart from others you'll see that using a shape mask compared with the Scopes and these ideals can really help us in getting creamy beautiful looking skin tones which is what you want for your talent and your films now if you're into this and you want to get more results like this I want to invite you to our free one hour online color grading workshop where we dive into the fundamentals and reveal the kinds of tips and tricks you don't normally see on youtube if you want to find everything in one place we'll also have a special offer for our color grading Academy at the end of the presentation for those who want to work with us more closely now if that doesn't sound like you and a lot of this seems overwhelming well let me introduce you to the cinema great plugin with it you can literally click on the skin tones and drag up or down to adjust their exposure you can click and track up or down to fine-tune their hue and finally drag up or down to dial in just the right amount of saturation plus with cinema great you also get a false color mode for getting the right exposure on the fly an incredible auto white balancing feature real-time previews of lots an x-ray color checker chart support for doing automatic Corrections you'll see a link for cinema great in the description below and a link for registering for the workshop so check out these options for all your color grading needs if we can help you to get the look of your films to stand out and LAN bigger projects or work in a bigger role well we want to see you do that and see you set your films apart for more great videos like this click the subscribe button and then the bell to get notified of our next one I'll see you in the next video let's make the grade [Music]

Channel: Color Grading Central

Views: 107,412

Keywords: skin tone, skin tones, how to get perfect skin, how to color grade skin tones, how to make sure i have the skin tones right, correcting skin tones, skin tones in premiere pro, color grading, color correction, flesh tones, color grading central, denver riddle

Id: A-PP68XgQng

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020