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Achieve Perfect Skin Tones when Color Grading

Achieve Perfect Skin Tones when Color Grading

When color grading your footage, achieving accurate skin tones is crucial. Regardless of your choice of editing software, whether it’s DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, or any other NLE, creating natural-looking skin tones can be challenging. Correcting and matching skin tones is essential for realistic-looking footage, ensuring that individuals appear natural and consistent throughout the shots.

To assist you in attaining perfect skin tones in your video projects, we have collated a guide based on the best practices from professional colorists. This comprehensive advice will be particularly valuable for those new to color correction and grading.

Featured image by Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay

In this article

Introduction

Understanding Skin Tones

Best Practices for Achieving Natural Skin Tones

  1. White Balance
  2. Primary Adjustments
  3. Use Scopes to Adjust Color
  4. Fine Tune Skin Tones
  5. Check for Consistency
  6. Color Grade for Mood & Syle

Other things to consider

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Understanding Skin Tones

People come in a vast spectrum of skin tones, ranging from the fairest alabaster to the deepest ebony. However, beyond these apparent differences, underlying tones are another factor in understanding and accurately representing diverse subjects.

Underlying tones refer to the warm or cool hues that subtly permeate the skin’s surface. They can significantly impact a person’s overall appearance and influence how colors interact with their skin.

What’s your underlying skin tone?

Take a look at your wrist. Do your veins look blue or purple? Then you have cool skin tones. Cool tones have bluish, pink, or ashy undertones. Do your veins have a greenish or olive tint? You have warm skin tones. Golden, peachy, or olive undertones characterize warm tones.[2]

Perfect skin tone? Let me explain in depth.

Vladislav Novickij, colorist and filmmaker, talks about how he achieves perfect skin tones. He uses the skin line on a vectorscope, an important reference tool for achieving natural-looking skin tones in color grading.

Perfect Black Skin Tones | DaVinci Resolve 17 Color Grading Tutorial

Sidney Baker-Green covers the workflow for color correction and grading for Black skin tones. He talks about the variations in skin tones, undertones, and more.

Best Practices for Achieving Natural Skin Tones

Professional colorists recommend following certain best practices when striving for flawless skin tones:

Step 1: Set your White Balance

Before diving into color grading, ensure your footage is correctly white-balanced. This step sets a neutral baseline, making subsequent color adjustments more accurate. Use in-camera white balance settings during shooting for the easiest color grading. Or, adjust the white balance in post-production using your editing software’s color wheels or temperature and tint sliders.

White balance specifies the color temperature at which white objects in your footage truly look white. With proper white balance, your footage looks natural. Proper white balance helps to ensure that the colors look correct on any screen or device where the footage may be viewed.

If you’ve worked with video for a long time, you understand the importance of proper white balance. If you’re new to video, here are a few resources to check out.

White Balance for Video Explained: How Cameras See Color & Light

Matt WhoisMatt Johnson explains white balance.

Use a Color Chart and Gray Card when Shooting

Tyler Bailey explains why he always shoots a gray card and a color chart to match colors on the shots, making color matching easy. This speeds up white balance and simplifies grading skin tones.

More about White Balance and using a color chart

Understand white balance in filmmaking. Adobe explains white balance, color temperatures of different types of lights, and how to adjust white balance settings in-camera. The article also talks about fine-tuning white balance in post.

5 WHITE BALANCE MISTAKES Videographers Make & How to AVOID THEM! Sam Holland explains setting white balance on a camera without using auto mode.

How to Correct White Balance with a Color Chart. No Film School explains how to correct the white balance of an image using a color chart and Adobe Camera Raw. This article is geared more toward photography but has some useful tidbits for video.

How do you use a color chart to ensure accurate color grading in post-production? LinkedIn’s community article about using a color reference chart will eliminate the guesswork when color grading. The article explains the color chart, why and how to use it, and gives some useful tips and tricks.

Step 2: Make Primary Corrections

After white balancing, start with primary corrections to balance the overall image. Adjust the lift, gamma, and gain to get the basic exposure and color balance right so colors are represented accurately. The aim is to establish a neutral baseline and ensure uniform color across your scenes, even if the footage was filmed with different cameras or lighting conditions.

This step also ensures skin tones are in the right ballpark before making finer adjustments.

Color Correction Basics – Primary Grades – Davinci Resolve Tutorial

MiesnerMedia walks you through primary grading in DaVinci Resolve. The tutorial is a few years old but the method is the same.

More about Primary Color Correction

Primary Color Correction. This article dives into primary color correction in DaVinci Resolve.

Color Matching Plugins

If you find color matching tedious, below is a list of plugins to help match shots quickly.

Step 3: Use Scopes to Adjust Colors

Scopes are a crucial tool for editors for consistent color correction. The vectorscope, featuring a skin line, is important for achieving natural-looking skin tones. The skin tone line represents the hue of natural skin tones, and you can adjust your footage to align with it.[5]

How to use resolve SCOPES – In-depth with a Pro Colourist

Darren Mostyn shows you how to read scopes in Resolve.

Third-Party Scopes

DaVinci Resolve has built-in scopes. Premiere Pro has Lumetri Scopes. There are also third-party tools to upgrade your scopes in Resolve, Premiere, and other hosts.

timeinpixels Nobe OmniScope

Nobe Omniscope is the perfect companion to your video or photo color correction software. It bridges the gap between the scopes in your software and expensive hardware scopes, used by professional colorists.

In the video below, Jay Lippman shows you how to use in DaVinci Resolve.

timeinpixels Nobe OmniScope

timeinpixels Nobe OmniScope

GPU acceleration, HDR, StreamDeck support

timeinpixels Nobe OmniScopeis a flexible and high-performing set of scopes loaded with powerful features that make color grading easy. Available for various platforms: DaVinci Resolve, Scratch, Premiere Pro & After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, as well as DeckLink, UltraStudio, AJA U-TAP, and more!

Learn More

Boris FX Continuum BCC VideoScope

VideoScopes is an overlay that shows scopes for Luma Waveform, RGB Waveform, YCbCrWaveform, a Vectorscope, and a Histogram.

VideoScope is included in the Continuum (subscription and perpetual) and also in the Continuum Color and Tone Unit.

Step 4: Fine-tune the skin tones.

Fine-tune skin tones using the curves tool, adding subtle reds to shadows if needed. Use color wheels to balance shadows, mid-tones, and highlights to maintain natural skin tones. Many of the tutorials shared on this page explain fine-tuning color.

Don’t Mess Up Your Skin Tones! 5 Color Grading Tools For Perfect Skin!

Dunna Did It gives advice about using vector scopes, balance adjustment (white balance), Color Warper, and more.

Step 5: Check for consistency.

Look through your shots and ensure that skin tones and color look consistent throughout your project.

Keys to Consistent Color

Cullen Kelly talks about strategies for consistent results when color correcting and grading footage.

Step 6: Color grade to set the mood and add a cinematic aesthetic.

Now that your shots have balanced color and your skin tones look natural, artistically adjust your colors to add atmosphere and mood to your shots.

Secrets to Cinematic Color Grading

In this video from colorist Cullen Kelly, he talks about how to get a cinematic look.

Other things to consider

Setting up your workspace for color grading

It’s important to consider the color temperature of the light in the room you’re working in, reflections and glare from the walls and furniture, positions of lights, and more.

Chris Francis from Church Film School talks about his grading room remodel, below.

Calibrate your monitor

A properly calibrated monitor is essential for accurately working with color. Without calibration, the colors on your monitor could be misleading, resulting in a final product that looks different when viewed on other screens.

See also: Monitor Calibration: Why is it So Important? By Maurizio Mercorella

Work in higher bit depths

First and foremost, ensure that you are working in 16 bits per channel (bpc) or higher whenever possible. You’ll attain more convincing color representation, more accurate shadows, and overall better results when adjusting colors. This is all you need to know, however, in the box below, we dive a bit deeper on WHY it’s important to use higher bit depths.

Bits Per Channel (BPC) affects your image quality

Bit Depth or Color Depth is the number of bits on red, green, and blue channels in an RGB image. More bpc delivers more color combinations and accuracy.

  • 8 bpc provides a maximum of 256 shades each of red (8), green (8), and blue (8) for an RGB image of 24 (8×3). You will likely see banding in gradients in 8 bpc.
  • 10 bpc reaches 1024 colors per channel
  • 16 bpc allows for a lot more colors per channel – 32,769 to be exact. and an RGB image of 48 bits (16×3).
  • 32 bpc supports 16,777,215 colors, and with an alpha channel, supports 4,294,967,296 color combinations.[1]

Note: As the number of colors increases, more system resources are required. If you are using an older computer, it may choke on 32 bpc.

Common Mistakes to Avoid when Color Correcting Skin Tones

While working with digital footage, achieving perfect skin tones can be challenging and may lead to various issues. Avoiding some common mistakes can significantly improve the professionalism and overall appearance of your final product.

To achieve optimal color correction, it’s crucial to avoid these common pitfalls:

  1. Skipping primary corrections: Before applying creative color grades, focus on essential adjustments to balance the image and establish a neutral starting point.
  2. Unfamiliarity with color theory: Understanding how colors work together is vital for effective color correction.
    See How to Not Suck at Color – 5 color theory tips every designer should know
  3. Using an improperly calibrated monitor: Inaccurate monitor settings can lead to incorrect color perception and adjustments that don’t translate well to other screens.
  4. Grading in an unsuitable environment: The lighting and surroundings of your grading suite can influence your perception of colors. Be aware of reflections on your screen.
  5. Neglecting shot balancing and matching: Ensure consistency across different shots and scenes before applying creative color grade.
  6. Oversaturating or overcorrecting skin tones. Avoid pushing saturation too far, which can result in unnatural skin tones. Don’t try to make them lighter, darker, or tanner than they are. It will look unnatural.[3]
    See Common Color Grading Mistakes among Beginners
  7. Confusing color correction and color grading: Color correction should focus on balancing and matching shots, while grading involves applying creative looks.[4]

Conclusion

Achieving flawless skin tones in post-production can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be overly complex. You will attain realistic and accurate skin tones by adhering to best practices, such as establishing the correct white balance and color balance, utilizing video scopes, and ensuring consistency among shots. This process requires a fundamental understanding of color theory and dedicated practice, regardless of the software you use.

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