today i'll show you how to make sure your skin tones are perfect in premiere pro
hey guys i'm rafael and welcome to the channel where our goal is to always fix it in camera and
then finesse it in post and i always appreciate the early thumbs up on the video because skin
tones are awesome but sometimes they are not and they need to be tweaked to make them look right
let's say the white balance was off a little bit or the exposure of the footage wasn't perfect or
there are color casts from the environment or even if your monitor isn't perfectly calibrated you may
not notice the skin tones are off the process i will show you today will let you know and
correct any of those issues but this process also assumes that the footage is already base corrected
if you shot in log you'll first have to correct it to a color profile like rec 709 i made a video how
to color grade c log footage in premiere pro you can find that link in the description i'll show
two ways to do this one with the built-in tools in premiere with lumetri and one with the red giant
colorista plugin i did the same tutorial in final cut using color finale and the built-in color
tools there the link is also in the description the process is simple and with a little bit of
knowledge on how to use the built-in tools in the application you'll learn to trust the numbers and
you'll have perfect skin tones every single time let's jump into the computer and i'll show you how
so first you want to go to your workspace go to color and if you don't see your scopes up click on
lumetri scopes if you don't see any of these just go to window and lumetri scopes make sure they're
turned on you want to have your vector scope and your waveform so you can just turn them on here
i like to set the brightness to high and set your waveform to luma so that way it's just a black and
white image we're just looking at the lumosity of the entire image the color information we're
going to be getting from this line right here this line right here is the skin tone
indicator so let's get started the first clip we have selected first we're going to do with
the built-in lumetri color and then we're going to do with colorista if you have that plug-in
and because this is a log shot we want to make sure that we base color corrected before we start
tweaking the skin tones so looking at over here we want to make sure that we expand the contrast in
the waveform so we're going to open up the color wheels first thing i'm going to do is bring down
the shadows and then bring up the highlights until the brightest until the brightest thing
in the shot is just about touching i always like to bring it to about five percent and about 95
next we're just gonna add a simple s curve overall just to give it some more contrast
and some more contrast and i have a whole dedicated video on how to color correct c
log footage with no conversion lots or plugins now that we have a base color
correction let's make sure that the skin tones are actually the proper color that we want
the first thing that i like to do is make a little mask around the cheek area
and i prefer to go to one of the brightest spots on the face
because that will help determine where the color is so right now you can see that
the skin tone is actually pretty good and it's at about 60 ire we don't want
the skin tone to be brighter than 70 ire between 50 and 70 or 40 and 70 depending on
depending on the skin tone so we're going to open up color wheels again and just ever so
slightly tweak it to the yellow just shift it over in the direction and make sure that it is
just tweak it ever so slightly to make sure that it's right on that line this is where you can add
a little bit of saturation if you wanted to but not too much just go into the mask and turn it off
so now we can see that the lumoscope is showing us the brightness of the image from left to right
so this right here is the r that right there is the window this gorgeous line right here is that
so you can see that the skin tone is about the brightest
at about 70 ire and then the blacks don't ever get into full on black but the skin tone
just double checking when we turn the mask back on
is right on that skin tone indicator now this is one of those things if you really wanted to
test it let's just push it way off see what happens we're going to turn off the mask
you can see the skin tone starting to look very awkward let's move it into the green
and now it's gross so let me move it back to its place you can see that the skin tone is right on
now we're going to add colorista and do the exact same thing
we're going to open up the control panel we're gonna set our video as log in this case
so we can take a look at so we can have our scopes open at the exact same time the shadows
to about five percent we're gonna pump up the highlights until they're just about touching 100
we're gonna add saturation to the overall shot
add a little bit of contrast using the curve adjustment so again this is the logo here
this line is the face and when we turn on the opacity again and go to lumoscopes
that is telling me this the vector scope is telling me that this is proper skin tone color
so this is before and corrected one of the other things you can do is use the secondary in lumetri
or in colorista where you actually select the skin tone so in this case we're selecting
just the color of the skin but this is a little bit more advanced
but it definitely helps you select only the skin so any color correction that you do only affects
the skin and doesn't affect anything else in the scene it's a good way to just isolate the skin
tone but you have to be very careful to make sure that none of the edges is too hard and you have
to soften out these parameters otherwise it can start to look very weird and get weird blotching
when you push it a little bit too hard just make sure you do add a little bit of blur or denoise
so you don't get any kind of weird blotching around the edges when you push it a bit too far
you can tweak the skin tone to be perfect without affecting the rest of the image at this point this
is where you can start adding in some creative touches add a different colors to the shadows and
the mid-tones without affecting the skin tone too much and after this point this is when you
can start going in and tweaking and doing all your creative color correction this is a simple way to
know that your skin tones are correct making sure that you use the vector scope and the luma scope
to get your skin tone color on the skin tone indicator line and also keep it between 40
and 70 ir now that you have perfect skin tones check out this video on how to color grade c
log footage in premiere pro and here's a playlist of great tips to make better content
faster as always thanks for watching give me a big thumbs up subscribe i'm rafael i'll talk to you
soon
you