- This is bad, this is good.
This is skin tones,
one of the most difficult things to get right
when creating videos and maybe you've got your pastor
preaching on stage or you're producing a talking head
video at your church, getting your skin tones
to pop and shine on screen is so important.
So in this video I'm going to show you
how to do it and walk you through my process
for getting my skin to look good on screen.
So let's get started.
(soft hip music)
Well hey there, I'm Brady Shearer, this is Pro Church Tools,
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Now for me there are five steps
that I follow to make sure that the skin tones
in my videos look as good as they can and the first
two steps in the workflow actually happen before
I even hit record.
And let me just say off the top if this can work
for me and make my skin look passable on video
it can work for anyone.
I often have blemishes on my face,
and thanks to a rough go of it with acne
during high school and Bible College,
I've got a considerable amount of scarring,
on both of my cheeks as well so I get not everyone's
skin is stunning as is but that doesn't mean
that we cannot make noticeable improvements in our videos.
Let me also say that this is the follow up
video to a recent video that I did on color grading,
as a whole, so if you haven't watched through that,
then we'll have it linked above,
and in the description because it covers
a lot of the color grading basics,
as well as what's needed to create cinematic
looks so if you haven't seen that give it a watch.
Now, believe it or not, the first thing
that I do is prepare my skin for being on screen
and I haven't always done this,
but I've been doing it regularly now
for the last six months or so
and I think it really does make a difference.
So I've got two things and the first
is I use these clean and clear oil
absorbing sheets to block away any
excess grease and shine from my face.
Shiny skin is not the look
that you want on video you want that matte look,
and especially when you're under lighting you know even
if it's LED lighting that doesn't create too much heat,
you can start to sweat and shine
and so this can combat that.
Also if you live in and especially humid
place like where I live during summer
this can be a lifesaver.
And now it is makeup time and apologies
to the ladies that are watching this video
I'm sure you appreciate this makeup tutorial
but for the men out there.
I've got an invisible blotting powder
here from a company called Foremen,
you just tap it all around your face like this,
like so, I've already done it so I'm not doing it now,
but it doesn't change any coloring
it goes on invisibly but it helps create
that matte look with no shine and no grease.
So here's the before and after with that makeup.
So that's the first step.
Next up is ensuring that my camera's white balance
is set properly because if you miss your white balance
in camera and have to change it in post,
this is where skin tones can start to get messed
up and you don't have as much latitude
in video as you do in photography
so I've got a gray card here that I use for this.
Basically, I just place
this in my cameras field of view,
sorry for the noise, where I intend to have my face
and then from there, I can do two things.
If I'm not in the studio,
I'll let my camera set its white balance,
using this card on location, if I am in the studio
like I am right now, and I know the listed
color temperature of my studio lights,
I'll set my white balance based on those lights
and then record a snippet of footage with this gray card,
so that I can make specific color corrections
in post because here's the thing, even though
you may know the color temperature of your lights,
and even if they're highly accurate
with their list of temperatures, every camera
perceives color slightly different
and if you want to get the most pinpoint accuracy,
a gray card is the way to go.
So let's jump into post now, we'll be editing
in DaVinci Resolve, and I'll show you
how I use this gray card plus,
I'll walk you through the tools within
Resolve to make your skin tones pop.
There's one trick in particular that works like magic.
So make sure to keep an eye out for that one.
(beeping)
Before we get into that there is one more thing
that you can do before post production
and that is using a special kind of filter
on your lens so this is a Black Pro-Mist Filter
from Tiffen and its claim to fame
is that it can smooth out skin tones and soften
blemishes and wrinkles
so here's what it looks like with and without,
and I'll let you be the judge on how effective
that you feel it is and you can buy this filter
in different stops to have the effect
be more or less intense.
This one I'm using here is the quarter stop filter.
Okay, just one more thing before we jump into Resolve.
it would be foolish for me to publish
a video on skin tones and not mention lighting.
And while we're not going to cover lighting techniques
in this video everything I've shown you thus far
and everything you're about to learn really pales
in comparison to quality lighting and to make skin
look great on video you especially want soft light
and the three most important factors
for this are the size of your light source,
the softness of your light source, and the proximity
of your light source to your subject
so for this video we're shooting
with an aperture 120 D, as my sole light source
and it's got the aperture, light dome on the front
that is diffusing the light and making the light
source much bigger and I also have the light
as close to my face as possible.
Basically, without entering the frame,
and that's a simple way to create flattering
light and for a quick comparison,
here's what the room lighting looks like if I just turn
on the light switch versus the video lighting
that we have setup so yeah, big difference.
That's my quick piece on lighting, now into Resolve.
Okay, so we're here in Resolve and the reason
that we're using DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic Design
is because it's 100% free,
and because it is the best color grading
software on planet earth and that is a very
rare combination to have the best option be free.
And like I mentioned previously,
I did a separate video on color grading
and an intro to resolve. So if you haven't seen
that we're not gonna recover some of those foundational
basics, that video is linked in the description.
Make sure you give it a watch.
Now when it comes to skin tones, the first thing
that I'm gonna do is make sure that our white balance
is set to pinpoint accuracy.
Now we made sure that we set the camera's
white balance to our studio light's white balance,
but every camera perceives color differently,
like I mentioned, so making sure that we get it even more
accurate within post is always a good idea
so I'm in the color wheels tab.
I'm gonna click on the little eyedropper
here in the bottom left corner and then all
I'm going to do is I'm gonna do I'm going to click
on the gray portion of the gray card right over my face.
And look at that difference I'll undo it,
and redo it again.
So you can see how much cooler it gets,
the white balance gets so much cooler,
simply by using this tool,
and now we have is basically perfect white balance,
and we can move on to the next stage.
Now there are a number of different ways
that you can do this within Resolve,
you can use the color match tab
here using the other side of your passport
or your gray card that comes with that.
To me, this is one of the easiest
and fastest ways to lock in white balance,
so I use this most frequently.
Okay, let's summarize everything up until this point.
We have prepared our skin for the video,
we've set our white balance properly.
We've made it pinpoint accurate
with our gray card within Resolve.
Now there's one final step, one kind of final check
before I move into processing my image
and adding all the fun coloring and doing some
of the advanced stuff I'm about to show you,
and that is to pull up my vectorscope right here
and you can see this line right here.
That line is where the skin tones within the color spectrum
are meant to fall, and so you can see this blob
of light right here is basically straddling this line
perfectly so that means that my skin tones
are exactly where they need to be.
Now if you're not seeing this line, you can just click
the settings here and show skin tone indicator
on your vectorscope is what you want to see,
and that will confirm with the scopes,
not just what you're seeing with your eyes that yes indeed,
your skin tones are where they need to be.
And now we can begin coloring.
Okay, let's get into the fun stuff now.
I've used color space transform to convert
my log image into a rec 709 fully colored image,
reintroduce the saturation and contrast,
we cover all that in the previous videos,
so we're not gonna do it again here.
At this point, here's where mistakes begin to be made
if they haven't made already with skin tones and coloring.
So let's say I want to add a stylistic look
to this image and I want to use a LUT,
so I go into my LUTs table here in Resolve and I know,
okay I love dark monochrome too, especially in the studio,
so I add it on and I'm like, oh yes, look at my LUT,
the coloring is amazing.
The problem that we've just introduced into our image
is that the same LUT that affects everything behind me
and around me in this studio, that looks great.
Here's the before and after, oh yeah,
love that moody blue look,
that effect has also taken place on my skin tones
and now our perfectly calibrated skin
that was looking exactly where it needed to be is now
very blue and sickly because the same LUT
is applied to my skin.
So what you wanna do here is use a qualifier.
So within Resolve, I'm going to create
a layer node like this.
And what a layer node does is, everything below
is what you are going to bypass basically.
This is what happens first, this is what happens after.
So I'm gonna go into my qualifier right here.
And what I'm going to do is Shift+H
so you can see what I'm doing,
and I'm just gonna start dragging
this across my skin to get a nice key,
so maybe I went too far there, let's try it again.
Okay, that looks good.
Let's try to round it out.
Okay, that looks good and now in my D noise here,
I'm gonna bring this up to let's say, 20.
Do the same with my blur radius.
And that's great.
So now, basically, all I told Resolve to do is okay,
just bypass this skin, and now look at this.
Now my skin is not being affected.
Here's the before, blue.
Here's after, color returned.
Oh great, color is returning.
This is very good, and that simple thing can make a big
difference and now I can go into my qualifier
here which is my skin and say,
okay, let's see if I bring up my scopes,
what do I see here with my skin?
Alright, as you can see with the vectorscope
it's right on that line, very good.
Maybe I want to add some more saturation,
let's say, bring it up to like 54.
I'm gonna have it over here.
Okay, that looks a bit better.
And now what we've done is we've bypassed our skin
with our look and so we can still add a stylistic look
without affecting our skin tones,
which is very good.
Now I'm looking at my skin right here, and I think I might
wanna make some adjustments, it just looks a little
bit too green to me.
So I might just drag this in the mid tones
a bit in that direction,
and play with that a little bit more,
but basically this is a really good spot to start
with and I can make some kind of fine
minute adjustments from here.
Okay, one more really cool thing I wanna show you.
This is the final step, this is the secret step
that does some crazy cool things.
So I'm gonna go back to the skin qualifier
that I have right here, and I'm going to go back
to my color wheels into the second tab here, to MD.
Now MD stands for mid tone, mid tone detail in particular.
And what's cool about this is that if I drag
it to let's say the sweet spot which is -20,
it's gonna remove some of the detail within
the mid tones of my image, and when you consider
where your skin tones fall within the highlights
mid tones or shadows of an image,
they're all gonna be falling within the mid tones.
So if you remove the mid tones detail,
what you'll do is you'll essentially remove
some of the detail from the mid tones, obviously,
which will smooth out the face,
and what this is especially good at is providing
some smoothing to the face in a subtle way
so it's not like you know you're going in Photoshop
and you're just like you know scrubbing over everything.
You can't really do that in video, but making that mid tone
detail a -20 is a very, very cool
thing that you can do that will smooth out your skin
and make them look absolutely dynamite.
And that's basically it.
The four things that I'm gonna do in post production,
I'm going to make sure my white balance is correct,
double check on my vector scope, qualify the skin
so any color stylistic changes
that I'm adding don't affect my skin.
And then finally, I'm going to remove some
of that mid tone detail to smooth out
any of the imperfections in my face
and then one final thing.
If let's say, you'd like to add a little bit
of that LUT into your image,
what you can do is you can go into this key frame
right here and see this key output.
It's at one right now, which means that 100%
of what is selected in this key is bypassing that LUT,
but if I make this let's say eight,
that's basically saying let's make it 80%.
And now, a little bit of that LUT
is being applied to my face.
It's not completely bypassing the coloring,
because if you do it, a 100% bypass,
sometimes it can be like a bit extreme,
like two different colorings completely, it's a bit obvious,
but if you make it 80%, you'll blend it slightly
to make it a little bit more natural
while still kind of accomplishing
what we're trying to accomplish
which is not to make our skin look all blue
in the instance of this LUT.
So that'll do it for this video.
If you do have follow up questions, make sure
to leave them below, subscribe to the channel,
turn on notifications, give this video a like,
and I'll see you in the next one.
(soft hip music)