Learning the "Skin Tone" adjustment is a necesscity

[stephenlnoe]

Stephen - I have not used this function as yet, use various filters to get a softer feel for certain advertising products or female shots. What difference do you find between using this in-camera feature and filters? what are the pros and cons?

Thanks Stephen...

Stu...
www.studioscotland.co.uk

I think the major difference is that you can select a color and adjust it's softness while leaving the other parts of the frame in tact. With promist or black promist you get the entire frame under promist's look. Selectively softening an image can be very usefull.

 

[heartajack]

It'll be nice when some one writes a book about all the features of this camera. I just want to make my little movies and not spend a whole lot of time tweaking settings. Set my f-stop, focus, frame and shoot. Maybe that sounds half-assed, but that's how I like to work Probably why I'll never work on any "real" projects!

 

[jlames]

I think something that we fail to do because time is so precious is to take the camera out and just play with it without being in a rush. Remember, as a Producer, I don't profess to know what my guys and girls do who specialize in bringing the look I see in my head to the screen. But that's been changing since getting involved with HD ($300,000 investments will do that to you). I'm constantly amazed at the depth of knowledge possessed by the people here, none more so than Stephen and over the past few days, I've been taking the time to experiment with the camera's settings. They truly do produce stunning results...some good some not so good. The point being is that the tools we as artists use have come so far in recent years, if we take the time to experiment, great things happen and this skin tone posting is a prime example of that. Just an observation from one of the family after a very long day.

 

[joelnet]

Stephen - I have not used this function as yet, use various filters to get a softer feel for certain advertising products or female shots. What difference do you find between using this in-camera feature and filters? what are the pros and cons?

The pros of using a filter (or the skin feature) are they happen instantly at record time. The cons are they are on tape forever and you don't get a second shot. Promist style filters smooth the entire frame.

The concept of this JVC feature is sorta amazing. The result would hopefully be sharp pupils, eyebrows and hair but smooth skin tones that do no accentuate blemishes.

That's something you could do in post if you know what you're doing. It's certainly a common photoshop technique for portrait artists. If it really does work in camera as advertised it would be a very handy timesaver for fast turnaround stuff like News Reporters etc.

Other cameras have skin detail settings, but JVC's allows the ability to define the skin tone range as well as the amount of the effect. In theory, that should make it much more effective than what the competition is offering. Definitely worth testing!

 

[Nate Weaver]

That's something you could do in post if you know what you're doing. It's certainly a common photoshop technique for portrait artists.

This sort of work is done regularly on commercials and music videos. At that level it's done on a Henry or Discreet product, and runs $600/hr. A 3 minute music video might take 3 8hr days of work.

I've approximated it in FCP using the chroma key filter, a stacked layer, and a gaussian blur filter. Lots of control and the ablity to really go in and get that (sometimes freaky) poreless beauty look.

Other cameras have skin detail settings, but JVC's allows the ability to define the skin tone range as well as the amount of the effect. In theory, that should make it much more effective than what the competition is offering. Definitely worth testing!

Lots of higher end cameras have this feature, and with more settings and controls than the HD100.

 

[joelnet]

Lots of higher end cameras have this feature, and with more settings and controls than the HD100.

Yeah - I was thinking of the HVX and other 2 HDV cameras.

Has the function been effective for you? Or does the post route produce a better result?

 

[filmguy1974]

I'm not really a big fan of the skin smoothing feature, myself. Face2Face on HDNet uses this same technique on a lot of its interviewees, and it just seems to obvious to me that it's being used when you have everything in frame in razor-sharp focus, and your subject's skin is slightly muddled by a digital, in-camera process.

Just my two cents. Admittedly, I haven't had time to fiddle with this feature on the HD100 specifically yet- maybe it's possible to implement it more subtlely than what I've seen on the airwaves.

 

[stephenlnoe]

I'm not really a big fan of the skin smoothing feature, myself. Face2Face on HDNet uses this same technique on a lot of its interviewees, and it just seems to obvious to me that it's being used when you have everything in frame in razor-sharp focus, and your subject's skin is slightly muddled by a digital, in-camera process.

Just my two cents. Admittedly, I haven't had time to fiddle with this feature on the HD100 specifically yet- maybe it's possible to implement it more subtlely than what I've seen on the airwaves.

Yes, I know what you mean. There are levels of detail that you can tailor the effect as well as you can get pretty narrow on the color selection that is affected. I've got the color selection down to only the lips of the talent being affected.