The Best Davinci Resolve Color Grading for Skintones Explanation Ever?

[herein2020]

So I have been shooting more fashion and higher end work lately and wanted to improve my color grading process without adding too much time or going down the endless rabbit hole that is known as color grading. My current process is to simply conform each clip to Rec.709 using a VLOG to Rec709 LUT make some minor tweaks using the waveforms then add an adjustment clip over the whole project to give it a certain look and feel. This works fine for events, real estate, etc. but what I am finding is that the finishing LUT is also affecting skin tones in ways that I did not like.

So a quick YouTube search turned up the below video which is what really helped me develop a new workflow that is almost as fast as my previous one but allowed me to greatly improve my color grade without adding too much more time to my process.

My new workflow is as follows:

1 - Apply a VLOG to Rec709 LUT to the clip

2 - Adjust the highlights and shadows using a mixture of the Log Wheels and Color Wheels until I have a good starting Rec709 image

3 - Apply a false color LUT to Node 2 to check for skin tone exposures then remove it when the exposure is right

4 - Create an adjustment clip and adjust the curves, saturation, etc while creating a skin tone layered node to control the skin tones separately

5 - Clone the adjustment clip to each subsequent clip and make small adjustments to the skin tone node qualifier to keep the creative grade from affecting the skin tones

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFPJOLTFP0

[kye]

Great to hear you're upping your colour grading game, and getting better results!

I watched that video a long time ago and found it quite useful at the time.  The workflow you describe above is a pretty standard workflow in colour grading circles.  In terms of how I believe it's normally discussed:

• Skintone exposure is typically set on location through a combination of camera and lighting / lighting modifiers
• Somehow the image gets converted to a 709 space
  (This can be via a great many methods, depending on your preferred workflow, but a conversion or PFE LUT is fairly common)
• The adjustments that get made to the whole image are referred to as primary adjustments, or "primaries"
• The adjustments that get made to parts of the image (for example via power windows or a key) are secondary adjustments, or "secondaries"

Colour grading can seem like a bit of a dark art, and in many ways it is, but it's definitely a case of the 80/20 rule where you can put in a little effort and get a big reward in return.

Here are a few videos that I've found useful that cover the basics but go a little further than Avery does in the above video...  enjoy!

Great video from Wandering DP (excuse the clickbait title - it was done as a joke!):

I can't speak highly enough of Wandering DP - his channel is full of cinematography breakdown videos where he talks about lighting and composition and are tremendously useful if you shoot your own content.  Ironically, the above video by him talking about colour grading is better than most YT colour grading videos, despite the fact he isn't a colourist, doesn't claim to be one, and this is the only video on his channel that talks about it!

I have gone through a kind of mental 180 degree shift in how I think about shooting and colour grading over the last 6 months or so, and I think that his videos have played a significant part in that transformation.  My understanding about how to go about shooting and grading is now far simpler, clearer, and I'm getting radically better results, and I'm not sure how I didn't understand this years ago or how there is any other way to think about it at all!

And to take things up a notch, here's a video from Waqas, who is a professional colourist and obviously enormously talented.  This video shows his approach, how he might make a commercial grade, and how he might make a cinematic grade.

I can also recommend his videos too, as although he has a standard approach that he likes to use (as all colourists tend to have), most of his videos have little details and tips that you can pick up new stuff from, even if you've watched his other videos already.

You'll also notice if you look at his channel that he recently did long interviews with the DP and the Cinematographer of Joker.

The common theme between these two YT channels is that both of them are industry professionals, not internet professionals, so their frame of reference is how things are done on set, rather than the typical YT / Vlog / buy-my-LUT / links-in-the-description folks that are all over YT pretending to know what they're doing.

Good luck!

[herein2020]

Thanks for the links, I'm still unsure how far I want to go with color grading, I already have so much that I need to keep up with (video, audio, lighting, photography lighting, photography, photography editing, photography studio work, video green screen work, motion graphics, titles, lower thirds, Fusion, DR changes, aerial photography, aerial video, underwater video, etc...) the list never seems to end.  It always bothered me a little though that the LUTS I was using I knew were applying to some extent to skin tones and the referenced video really showed me what I was doing wrong.

 

I think for now just knowing how to control the skin tones regardless of the LUT as long as the skin tones were properly lit and the camera was properly configured will be very helpful.  I do get tired of digging through my LUT library trying to find one the "looks kind of nice" and it would be nice to be able to grade any scene to the way that I picture it in my mind, but there's only so many hours in a day. Working with the 10 bit VLOG out of the S5 is really helping too; I wasn't able to push and pull the colors like this using the 8 bit CineLike D footage out of the GH5.