How do you get perfect skin tones in DaVinci Resolve 2018 ?
Here is right now in color management my color science is set to yrgb but my timeline color space is set to DaVinci white gamut intermediate so every node in here is going to perform under the DaVinci white gamut, okay so this is how I have everything set up so what a beginner would do is he or she is going to go ahead and create a new node and then hear what they will do uh after their
Transform they're going to go ahead and raise their gamma a little bit okay then raise their gain to like really make sure that everything looks good so something like that before and after okay it looks good they'll take their lift and they'll pull it down a little bit to keep some contrast something like that and uh you know just by looking at it it doesn't look too bad so what's wrong
Like what is going on all right because beginner will have limited knowledge they just wouldn't know what to do another thing they will do after that is they're going to create a new node and they're going to create a window so there's usually a lot of window action going on because um people get excited about that right like if you've seen a tutorial online and if you're new to color grading and you see somebody using power windows and you see
The magic of power windows dodging and burning and all of a sudden you're just like I want to do that on everything yes there is a time and place for power windows and you can use them but if we do something like that and let's just say we soften it a little bit and then he's gonna go ahead and uh he or she and they're gonna bring out the baby a little bit right and let's just say they that they even know how to track it so they can do track forward and track
Backward with this one button in resolve 18. so that's pretty cool resolves tracker is unbelievable so it will latch on and everything is going to be for the majority of our grade pretty good right so that's what they will do now the problem with this is that one thing that I've noticed with beginners they always do that where they over-complicate their grade okay if
You know how to properly grade you don't need to do all this jiu-jitsu to get to what the beginner is trying to do to achieve a desirable effect or look so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go here and save this now we're going to create a pro version okay so I'm going to go ahead and delete these two leave this one as is now as a pro
Instead of building my grade after the CST, I'm going to build my grade before the CSD so I'm going to do everything upstream than downstream okay why is that well then you have to check out the free training to learn more we can't delve into that right now the link is in the description training is free to check it out the stuff that you're going to learn it is insane so what I would do to
Work with this shot is I will park it somewhere around here and the first thing that I want to do is I want to go under my custom curves and I'm going to grab my curve around here somewhere and I'm going to keep raising it okay and I'm going to park it somewhere around here and now what I want to do is I want to create another point right here and I want to start pulling it down okay
And I'm going to leave it somewhere around here now look at the beauty of what we just did remember how the highlights were completely clipped and blown-out well look at the highlights now everything is protected and it's beautiful it looks film-like, okay the approach that we used yet we brought out so much information in the most natural way possible as if there was an actual light on our subject, okay so that's the first thing that we
Did so since it was so easy to do this now we're gonna make this look a little challenging for ourselves meaning we're gonna take the time beginner took this time to cover up his mistakes or her mistakes we're gonna take this time to create a look create magic because with color grading it's all about that you gotta shave some time here so you can spend that time being creative it's
But dude your skin looks so bad and yes I agree with you so what I will do here is I'm going to create a parallel node, okay and with the parallel node what I can do is I can go under my hue versus hue and I'm gonna go select my yellow because that's where the skin tones are and I'm gonna start cranking it to something like this okay and then I'm going to take my reds and
I'm going to do the same thing not too much but still, let's bring it up a little bit and I'm going to keep my skin somewhere around here it looks nice and we still got the nice color separation going on that we created okay and now another thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go here because you see like how much teal we got seeping in here like we can tell
Right here too right like the reds are down here and then the greens and the blues so I'm gonna split the difference here okay so I'm gonna raise that a little bit like something like this okay and then I'm gonna pull this down to something like that and just check this out okay so now if I go before and after how clean it looks and uh we can what we can do here is we can just go under our contrast
And crank it a little but not too much something like that and leave it somewhere around here okay now do we want to keep creating the separation a little bit more we can try to do that so, first of all, I can just go under my log and create more of separation you know so I'll pull my reds down and keep my greens and blues up here right something like that and then pull this
Down a little bit more and park it right around here if I do before and after look at that so we're creating a nice like almost like queen's gambit palette going on here right and uh but the beauty of it is like how much we've separated our subject from the background like before this is just like a green mush right and we can see the warmth right here and now all of a sudden we got so many tones going on
Right like we got cooler tones right here we got a nice salmon theme going on here some yellows coming in or greens coming in through here right and now we can even accentuate on that a little bit if we want to right we don't necessarily have to but we can if we want to so like if I were to look at this and go do I want to do anything else with it I'm
Pretty happy with it right because wherever we go look at the separation I mean look at this to that how much of a separation we have here uh personally I'm pretty happy with this look right um let's just look and see if we can do anything else I'm going to park it on my hero frame and uh let's just look at it right so what else can we do what happens if I add one green that's a bit much right
That's just a little too much so I'll pull that back but what if we do half printer light and then we do this green right here right so if we do that now here I'm gonna go back here hue versus hue and then keep working getting my skin back sorry guys I'm just concentrating so something like this right and once again I'm looking at
The hand right here down here and it's just getting a little too blue and two teal so let's control that right so we can just pull that up like so something like that right and now if I take these two and just look at the difference look at how gorgeous that is okay so guys look at it if I go here and this is your
Beginner look at what's happening with the highlights look at what's going on right and then even tracking the face which is like has a halo effect so let's just say turn it off and now look at the two and here we didn't only just create a perfect curve to bring out the little guy we also went ahead and created a lovely look
On right here and then this area you know getting lost a little bit is not a big deal because the focus is right here okay so obviously it ended up taking a little bit longer because we just added a task but you saw how I approach this just this part right here a little action with your curves just knowing exactly what you need to do
Bring that up and that really put us in the ballpark where we needed to go and um it just did the trick I mean we can take this right now and we can even raise it like at this point if we just want to add a little bit more we can keep like cranking it up like this and just look at that so we brought up our guy even more and it does add more life to the entire image so I feel like I like this even better and now at this point if you kind
Of want to go back and loosen up the contrast you can right like I mean you can just take this and you can like raise it if you want to personally I like it where there is a little bit of like uh an intense contrast like I personally like that I feel like it just makes everything pop and separates the colors and the luminance values and everything so for me it works so this is where I would park it all right so let's
Do a quick recap let's kill these and this is our locked rec 79 um conversion right here then we started with a pretty sweet curve it's a custom curve we created for this particular shot and then the time that we saved by just quickly dialing in our image we went ahead and created a pretty interesting look and then countered that with our hue vs hue and brought our skin back and if I just
Take this and do before and after another thing that we can do is we can click on the split-screen and we can check out like look at these two versions right here I mean come on so this is our beginner's version and then this is our pro version and just look at the difference like look at these highlights right here okay compared to right here it just
Feels like we are applying a film print emulation to a completely different color science it just it's in a league of its right and it was just created like this in front of you and um I even took some time to do trial and error but if I just like was going in hard it could have been created in half the time so that's the power of doing things the right way guys and uh let's check out the final look in full