Blackmagic Forum

Guys,
I have hard time selecting skin tones perfectly. Pls guide me to most working tutorial. Masking for no contiguous skintones is not viable takes too much time selecting and tracking mask. thx

Yogendra Singh wrote:I have hard time selecting skin tones perfectly. Pls guide me to most working tutorial. Masking for no contiguous skintones is not viable takes too much time selecting and tracking mask. thx

I find a combination of a 3D Key and a very simple tracking garbage mask around the person will work 94% of the time. Done right (and done softly and with precision), it can work very well unless the lighting is constantly changing.

They've done some pretty good tutorials on skin qualification over on MixingLight.com, and I find a lot of their ideas very worthwhile.

Noted Fotokem colorist Walter Volpatto (who often hangs around here) has commented before that the most important thing is to get the initial "technical grade" just right so that the scene is well-balanced and exposed correctly for later adjustment. The effectiveness of the nodes after that all depend on the initial setup, so it's really important to get that right. Once you do that, generally for me, the skintones just pop right in. In very complex situations I might use a Layer Mixer just for skintone, but that would be for a pretty extreme situation where the actors were in a badly-skewed room with weird mixed lighting (or we've done a very hard correction overall and need to pull back just the skintones).

Yogendra Singh wrote:Guys,
I have hard time selecting skin tones perfectly. Pls guide me to most working tutorial. Masking for no contiguous skintones is not viable takes too much time selecting and tracking mask. thx

This might help:
Simple workflow for perfect skin tones | DaVinci Resolve tutorial
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFPJOLTFP0

Thx Marc and Will.
I had improved my workflow with your advice. I got 98% perfection. But it took many hours.

I’m not a professional colourist so my opinion may not reflect best practices, but I think the first steps in achieving good skin tones are selecting the right camera and applying the right Colour Science secret sauce to an image lit and exposed reasonably well.

Avery’s technique could be applied to any bad camera and any bad Colour Science as he’s really just painting in red, green, blue. He could do this technique with a camera shooting true monochrome. The technique is also far from the quick and easy way he zooms through the process. Fine for him since he has done it thousands of times. There are times when you’re grading for a certain look where it seems your starting colours are almost irrelevant anyway and shadows, kids, and highlights need to suit the scene and the grading goal. Not necessarily red shadows, orange mids, and blue highlights of course. That’s painting and completely appropriate when your actors don’t reveal any actual skin but are only a surface for heavy body makeup.

Is that what the OP wanted the know? Or did the OP want to nail real skin tones in any scene?


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