3 EASY Steps to get PERFECT Skin Tones | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

     What’s up everyone. Welcome to yet another amazing tutorial, one that you have been asking for, for a while now. 3 easy steps to get perfect skin tones in DaVinci resolve. I wanted to make this challenging so instead of using a high end camera, I use Sony 8-bit footage.

        Now in this, we aren’t going to be just leaving it at perfect skin tones, we are going to also be creating a cinematic look. But let’s dive right in, first picking our hero frame.

        Now we are going to start into our look. Contrary to what we normally do, I am actually going to start by cranking in some saturation.

 Now I am moving back to my primaries node. I am going to first start by moving my offset around to make this just a little more balanced and move the vectorscope to the middle more. Next we are going to dial in our contrast and pivot. We are going to pull back on the pivot a bit.

Just remember, to get perfect skin tones, you have to build your grade first. You have to lay the foundation for the skin tones to be able to be worked on. There is no magic button you press that gives out perfect skin tones.

We have already come a long way, but how can we keep going? We are going to pull our gain and lift down, but bring our gamma up a bit, giving it that filmic/cinematic look.

We just laid a great foundation for us to build off of.

        Moving onto the next node, our look node, this is going to be the foundation for our proper skin tones.

One thing to keep in mind is that skin tones live in the mids, so it is the mix between our gamma and midtone.

In this, I am going for just that pop/saturated skin. By pulling my gamma more towards the yellow/orange space, we are really able to eliminate that magenta that was in her face and bring her skin tones a lot closer to perfect.

Now I am moving to my log wheels where I am going to take my midtone towards the same direction. It’ll be very subtle, but it’ll make a big difference.

Look at how far we’ve come already, without even qualifying the skin. We’ve created color separation to pop her from the background. Now. if you are working on a documentary or a longer corporate video where you have to turn and burn, this would be okay to park it here. But in this tutorial we are going to take it even further.

        I am going to now create another node called hue vs. Again, you have to do all the things to get the perfect skin tones. We are going to work on the whole image in this node. I am going to start by clicking on her skin to get a selection in the curves section. I am going to extend the points a bit too. Now I am going to play around with it just a bit.

Now we are going to go into our hue vs saturation and do the same thing to grab her skin tone. Once that is done, we are going to give it some saturation to pull the skin out to create more separation.

Now moving onto hue vs luminance, this is one part I love for skin tones. Again, we are going to pick her skin like we did previously and then we are going to raise our skin tone to give her a bit of life.

Hue vs. options was our second step, but we can go even farther. Now we are going to focus, in the same node, on the background to separate the background from our subject. I am going to start in hue vs hue and select the background, open it up a bit and pull down on the knob.

Now I am going into hue vs saturation and I will pick the green like I did previously and pull up on the saturation. I am also going to take out the saturation in the black, by taking down our blues.

Now moving to hue vs luminance, I am going to pick the green the same way and I am going to bring it down to add more depth into the green, but also to separate her from the background and take more of the emphasis in the background away.

Just look at what we’ve been able to achieve so far. This isn’t just one thing that I am showing you. I want to show you many different steps, so that you can really get that skin tone flawless. I want you to see all the little nuances that go into dialing in the look.

        Now we are going to add another node to get a little more advanced. We are going to add a layer mixer to isolate the skin. In our seventh node (or bottom of our layer mixer), we are going to qualify her skin to grab her skin. It will need a lot of work because it is Sony 8-bit.

Now this key was clean. It did require work, but we also laid the foundation to separate her from the background making it easier to select her skin tones. Now I am going to go into my primaries and I am going to take my gamma and exaggerate it. Then I am going to lift my lift to give her soft and smooth skin. Then I want to put a bit of red back into the gain.

Next I am going to go under midtone detail and drop it to around -30.

There we go, that was step three. Now in my top of the layer mixer nodes, or node five, I am going to take my gain and add a little bit of warmth into the whole image. This blends it in just a bit. Then, to counteract that in my midtones, I can take my gamma and cool it off just a bit. Then I am going to take my lift to the blue side just a touch.

        Now I am going to create another node after the layer mixer called pop. I am going to use my curves to create this pop.

Then to control my highlights, I am going to bring down my gain a touch. Then I am going to take my gamma and lift it a bit to keep that life in her skin.

We are adding pop without overdoing the image. One last thing, we are going to use our high soft to recover our highlights.

        Now adding another node, we are going to create a vignette to really pop her out from the background. To do this, we are going to create a power window around her, and then soften the heck out of it and invert it.

Then I am going to use my curves to take it down a lot to add a ton of pop.

That added a lot of pop to her.

        Now we are going to add some glow to these settings below.

If the skin looks a bit red, we can pull it down in our offset for the entire look.

        Now I am going to create a new node for our FPE (film print emulation). The one that I am going to be using is the Kodak 2383 D55 which is included in resolve.

Now when you drop it on, it’ll be too crazy, so we will have to dial it back. We are going to go into our key and take our key output to about .750

Now I am going to go back to my primaries and dial back on the contrast and then I am going to bring my gain down a hair.

Now look at the skin. Can you believe this is from Sony footage?

        Finally, I am going to add grain starting with a base of 35mm 400T. Then I am going to add grain size and strength.

Now a different version, in case you don’t love how pushed it is, we can go back into our hue vs options and grab our green and pull it down, but that is all preference and up to you.

        One thing I want to say is that our third node, or our look node, I would personally keep it off because it looks more natural without it.

        Now let’s check out the final look in full screen!

        Now I hope you guys had a blast! We did say three steps, but then we ended up slashing one of those steps, but that’s why it’s important to have multiple nodes, so that if something doesn’t sit right, you can go back and turn off that node. But I hope you guys learned a lot and I hope you see how easy it is to work with skin tones when you take your time and follow these three steps!

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