Depending on the specific piece of footage you are working with, any and all of the parameters in the qualifier window may need to be adjusted. You are essentially going to fine tune your qualifier settings to isolate as much of the skin tone as possible, while minimizing other colors/areas of the frame. There are always other elements in your shot that will have a similar hue/luminance value to the skintones you are trying to grade, so you need to do a bit more work to really isolate them. You are going to wind up with something that looks like this:īy the way, you’ll want to hit SHIFT + H to toggle between this view, and a regular view of the footage without the skin selected.Īs you can already tell from the image above though, we have selected a lot more than just skintones here. The first thing you want to do is open up your qualifier tab in DaVinci Resolve, and use the eyedropper tool to select the skintone of your talent. So don’t worry if you feel like no matter what you do your images don’t match perfectly yet… That’s what this step is for. Lenses all have different characteristics, lighting can change, and all sorts of other variables can come into play that affect the consistency of skintones from shot to shot. Here are the four steps I recommend following: Step 1Īssuming you have already balanced all of the shots in your sequence, there are still going to be some differences from shot to shot. From there you can start to isolate elements in your image (skintones being the one we are focusing on here of course), and then eventually you will add an overall creative look to your footage.įor the purpose of this article, we are focusing mainly on that middle stage – isolating the skin tones and grading/matching them to the rest of the footage. You want to ensure that your white balance/contrast is consistent with other shots in your sequence, and ideally each shot is at a neutral starting point. Like any other proper color grade, you need to start your process by balancing and matching your shots to each other as closely as possible using one or two nodes that are simply dedicated to fixing technical issues. Well, as I already alluded to above, a lot of it comes down to your order of operations. We’ve touched on a couple of fundamental issues you want to avoid when it comes to skin tones, so what actually is the best way to approach them? There are ways to fix this without having to rebuild the entire grade, but it’s a lot better to just get it right the first time. Rather than following the correct order of operations (as outlined in this blog post), they will jump straight into giving their footage a creative look and then will have major issues trying to adjust skintones later on, because the look that they have created is so extreme. They start giving their footage a “look” before they have fixed any skintone/matching problems. If you were to grade that image based around the skin tones (and obviously you would need to warm the skin up since it would be blue in comparison to the tungsten light), then the warm light sources in the background would become far too warm, and the image would look really strange.Ģ. Imagine you are working with an image that is shot in a mixed lighting environment, where window light is spilling on your talent’s face, but there is a lot of tungsten light in the background. they start to focus on skin tones, which inevitably throws the rest of the image off balance. In other words, before actually balancing their image, adjusting contrast, fixing white balance issues, etc. They base their entire grade around the skin tones, and neglect everything else. Typically when inexperienced colorists attempt to grade skin tones, they make one of two mistakes:ġ. If their skin tones don’t look natural, or don’t match the environment and other shots they are integrated with, you are in trouble! Unless you’re grading a montage of landscape shots, chances are the focal point of every shot that you grade is going to be your talent. It goes without saying that skin tones are what give life to your image. Throughout this post, I’ll outline my favorite technique for grading and matching skin tones within DaVinci Resolve in just 4 simple steps… Skin tones are arguably the most important element of your image to get right when color grading, yet most editors and amateur colorists approach skin tones completely the wrong way.
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