EASY Skin Tone Guide - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

Working with Skin Tone is one of the more challenging aspects of color grading. In this video, we take a look at an easy way to make sure you get good looking Skin Tones in Davinci Resolve, every time.

*This technique also applies to Premiere Pro and Final Cut (as well as any other non-linear editing/grading software)...although the tools will appear slightly different in each application.

Getting perfect skin tones when grading is not as complicated as it might first appear.

For me, what separates the best from the rest when it comes to colour grading, is how a colourist manages skin tones. When I see the work from industry-leading experts such as Dave Hussey or Tyler Roth of Company 3, it's not the stylised grade that stands out for me, it's the way they get skin tones to look so natural.

Let's take a look at a couple of easy steps to help you improve your colour grading when it comes to working with skin tones. I'm using DaVinci Resolve in this demonstration, but the same tools are available in other applications.

Firstly we're going to take a look at the Vectorscope and how it can help you measure the hue and saturation levels of your skin tones. It should be your go-to tool, getting familiar with it will help you immensely.

It can differ from application to application, so make sure the skin tone indicator is turned on for your vectorscope in the preferences.

The Vectorscope will show you the colours or hue within your image and the saturation of them.

The skin tone indicator gives you a clear guide of roughly where your skin tones should be based, you can use a window, a mask or any other form of qualifier your application has to sperate the skin. The skin tone, ideally, should fall on or somewhere around this line, it doesn't always need to be perfectly on it. It is just a guideline.

By using the vectorscope and the skin tone indicator, you can avoid unwanted colour casts and keep your talent's skin looking as natural as possible.

Skin tones will differ from person to person, however, no matter what race or ethnicity, they all should be based around the same line. The Vectorscope only sees colour or hue, it can't see the luminance value that particular hue has.

You can use tools such as the hue vs hue curve or offset to correct your shots.

The saturation of skin tones can also be measured using the vectorscope. The closer the level gets to the edge of the circle the more saturated it will be. The correct saturation level will differ from person to person but as a quick rule of thumb, generally, skin tones should generally fall between 20-50%.

You can use the waveform to check the luminance of the skin tones you are working with.

The luminance values of your skin tones should be roughly between the 40 - 70 IRE Range. This isn't set in stone though and every seen will be different. As a rough guide, middle grey is generally 50-60% outside in the sun, 50% with window light, 20% in moonlight and roughly 30% in some sort of bar.

If you take a look at stills from other films, you can see where the skin tone levels are sitting on the charts. I find doing this quite useful.

Once you have corrected your skin tones, you can now start to grade them more to fit within your scene if needed.

To do this I like to add just a hint of colour from the environment into the highlights while maintaining natural reds in the mid-tones and shadows.