Changing yellow to brown - having trouble

Hey all,

I'm working on a short color project for a friend where he wants to change the "skin" color of a yellow lego-man. He essentially wants to go from yellow to light brown. For whatever reason I am having way more trouble with this than I thought that I would. Qualifying the yellow and tracking the matte is easy enough, and changing the "skin" to something crazier like green or blue is easy, but for some reason I can't get "brown" - the closest i can get is essentially "fleshy". Attached is a screenshot. I am using primary wheels, staring at the vectorscope using a reference color and trying to exactly match the scope. I am starting with my gamma to get "close" and then trying to dial in with Gain and Lift. Just starting to get frustrated, any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Using DaVinci 15 Studio on a 2013 MacPro.

You should familiarize yourself with the curves, like hue curves.

color concentrator is where i would turn

but i tend to avoid the curves like the plauge as they can break an image quickly, one frame may look reasonable but applying the correction to a moveing shot can create artifacts that are brutal, last choice / desprate times choice for me

Darken (try with gain dial), desaturate, and maybe shift the hue slightly towards red

I'd pull a key on the yellow area, make it soft, use a tracking mask around it, and then use lift/gamma/gain to push it in a brown direction, which is basically kind of a darker area between red and yellow. If necessary, have the client send you a still frame of what he or she considers to be brown, and match it to that sample. Note you'll need to get the hands as well, and if any characters cross in front of this one, you'll need to use a garbage matte around that object to avoid the key (also known as an occlusion mask). It can be done, it just takes time.

Don't forget the hands, BTW.