Getting The Best Skin Tone

[Shooter]

How did they avoid awful shadows on the face by using such harsh light?

Fresnel lighting is not necesarily harsh. Take a look at all the old beautifully lit classics where all they had were fresnels. (including arcs). Look at the skin tones ...particularly on the women.

Big soft box lighting is kind of "lazy lighting" and the real skills are in making fresnels work in conjunction wit the ambient and soft sources.

All light is not equal. (the same F-stop does not mean the same quality of light)Different sources (and reflectors) have different qualities. Its "light physics".

Fresnels have sharpness by design. Soft sources are less sharp but have "contour and rounding". Placement, ,intensity and distance are everything.

 

[yatti]

Really a good thread:dankk2:

 

[TheDingo]

In a word... tons of lights...

It's only tons of lights if your location is large. Everything is relative.

i.e. an average size room in a house does not require tons of lights, unless you are trying to recreate the alien abduction scenes from CE3K

..."Quality of light" trumps everything else, which usually means proper use of key lights, fill lights, diffusion, gobos, and reflectors.

 

[gonzo_entertainment]

That's really that advantage of DSLR (well digital in general). You need just as many lights as you ever did, but they don't need to be as powerful. You can light the typical medium interior with 200s and 650s, maybe a 1K comes out on occasion. I can't really think of many scenarios where you'd need a 2K on an interior (that isn't a huge warehouse) unless you were trying to compete with a big bright window. The mechanics and rules are all the same, the volume has just decreased with ISO that film couldn't achieve.

 

[vic777]

I want that really nice skin tone that you see in higher end productions, and I'm not really sure how to get there. Thoughts?

Thanks!
- Tommy

Get Actors with the nice skin tones you want .... then shoot them.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

It's only tons of lights if your location is large. Everything is relative.

i.e. an average size room in a house does not require tons of lights, unless you are trying to recreate the alien abduction scenes from CE3K

..."Quality of light" trumps everything else, which usually means proper use of key lights, fill lights, diffusion, gobos, and reflectors.

Well... of course... I made the 'tons of light' in reference to the "Avengers"(2012) 'bridge scene' still of Robert Downy Jr. The June American Cinematographer has an article, which includes a lighting diagram for the 'bridge' set. There are 'tons' of lights...

I'm working on shooting a short over the weekend... There's a warehouse scene... I don't have 'tons' of light, so I'm going to have to figure out what I can do with 'no lights'... except for large bay windows...

Don't worry... If it doesn't work out... I'll condemn it to the bit depths of the e-sea...

 

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

Get Actors with the nice skin tones you want .... then shoot them.

How helpful.

 

[bruceallen]

I have to say that this thread is a heck of a lot better than any skin tone thread on RedUser.

All you get there is Mark Toia pestering you and saying "IT'S RAW! YOU CAN MAKE IT ANYTHING YOU WANT!"
Wow... if that was true then can I record 24bit 192khz "raw" audio with a RadioShack microphone, and make it sound like a ribbon microphone, right?

CPC's comments about polarization killing subsurface scattering are fascinating.

Postmaster's CRI example picture is excellent, too.

Can I just add one thing? Include the sensitivities and purity of the color filters on the camera. You need to think of it holistically:
Color is about a spectrum of light (including infrared) being emitted (which could have spikes, biases, etc)... then hitting a subject.
When it hits that subject, certain chunks of the spectrum get reflected back and others get cut. Makeup can affect this a lot - and not just in the visible spectrum.
Then this light hits the camera R, G, B filters.
These filters cut out more chunks of the spectrum (but not perfectly - there is crosstalk, IR pollution, etc - and sometimes they actually cut out too much - eg far reds).
Then the light hits the sensor.
Then finally we get picture.

There are just so many places where this can differ from what the eye perceives.

But what weirds me out is how well film does, and how poorly digital does by comparison!

However, DSLRs in stills mode (and sometimes video mode, even) get close. So there is hope?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Bruce Watson]

There are just so many places where this can differ from what the eye perceives.

But what weirds me out is how well film does, and how poorly digital does by comparison!

However, DSLRs in stills mode (and sometimes video mode, even) get close. So there is hope?

Absolutely there's hope. Remember, it's taken film more than 100 years to get to its current level. Digital has been around (by that I mean, used by professionals) for, what, 20 years? Digital is still in its infancy, yet some digital cameras already come close to matching what film can do. Come back in 10 years and you'll find people wondering how we used to be able to get anything done at all with all the restrictions of film.

 

[Postmaster]

If you guys want to look deeper into skin tones, I found this here pretty interesting: http://www.divergentmedia.com/blog/fullpost/humanae_project_fleshtones

Frank

 

[morgan_moore]

Frank nice blog

On the skin tone line being in the wrong place I (in my FS100 journey) did get the skin to sit on the line, simply my white british model looked chinese, it would seem to me that that is an asian line and as the blog suggests the typcial caucasian sits a little clockwise of it..

S