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Skintones - how to achieve this look?

Malte Løkken

Malte Løkken

Hello guys,

I've been trying around with some skintones looks, and there's one look that I just can't seem to nail. In certain situations I think this "Redish shadows" look, is great for creating a mood, and I've seen it used many times in blockbuster movies.
l.png


Do any of you know how to make this redish look in the skintones, like shown in these pictures?
-are there any good techniques?

If I isolate the skintones, and add red in shadows/lift,(of course going the opposite way with the gain/mid.. so skin doesn't turn red completely) it looks terrible, and nothing like these looks.
 
Yeah curves will get you there, but sometimes I find I get tangled up in them as they can be a bit fiddly and offer more control than I usually need.

In resolve I usually treat skin with 3 nodes all in log mode.

1. The main node with skintones qualified controls the overall tone but is mainly for the mids and highs. I usually like to add a bit of yellow/green to the mids and cool the highs by adding a bit of purple/blue. You will need to play with the high and low range.

2. The second node is usually in parallel to the first node and uses the exact same qualification. This is the node I use to add the golden warm red tones you are after. I use the shadow log wheel and raise the low range. Then I push purple/red into the shadows. At the same time the more red you add you need to drop luminance with the slider under the shadow log wheel. If you dont do this you'll end up with pink instead of rich reds.

skintones_shadow.jpg


3. The third node is in parallel to the other two and qualifies just the reddest parts of the skin, usually the lips, the red blush of the cheeks and the subsurface scattering of the ears. I push a bit more purple/red into these areas, and drop the luminance in the same way as above. This node will really make your skin look alive especially with Red footage.

I pretty much never limit the skin qualifications using power windows. I let them qualify things of the same colour throughout the scene. 90% of the time if it makes skintones look good it makes the rest of the scene look good as well.

Heres a quick and dirty example of the above 3 node technique using some Epic footage I shot as a screen test.

skintones_before_910.jpg


skintones_910.jpg


skintones_crop.jpg
 
Juan, this is great! Really helps me achieve the look I was going for.
I've been using your luts for a good while now, and I got a question you might have the answer to:
-So a couple of weeks ago, I was doing a project, filmed with a video profile, and I had some very saturated blues/teals, and when I put on the LUT, everything looked nice as always, but those blues had some severe artifacting going on. So my question is, do the luts do gamut remapping, or do the colors clip?
 
The ConstantLmap versions do gamut remapping... I'm not sure what artefacts you are seeing, but I usually see that saturated blues tend to lose detail and variation in hues when the LUT is applied. You'll see this in a lot in films that have nightclub scenes, the coloured lights tend to flatten out and they look like a solid block of colour. Easiest way to fix this is to qualify the problem colour and either desaturate it a fraction, drop it in luminance or introduce another hue into the brightest most saturated part, or a combination of all three.
 
Juan Melara said:
I should have added this yesterday. This shows the effects of the two nodes that are adding red to the shadows and the lips etc.

skintones_comp_910.jpg
Click to expand...

Thank you for the great tip! Can you share the footage with us - a 1080p version if possible - so we can try out the result? Sometimes it's much more easier to work on a before after footage than a completly new one. Of course only if it's not a problem for you! :) By the way I really liked your first tutorial, keep them comming!!!
 
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