How to tint everything but skintones

[starcentral]

A lot of what you see online in tutorials, etc.. will be using a qualifier on skin in Davinci Resolve and then adjusting the hue, saturation and luminance sliders to help hone in on the skin color itself.

Sometimes if the qualification spills out to other parts of the frame you can use a power window to limit what it affects, so hence for example a large oval over top of the head. Using a qualifier is a great technique as a subject walks through a frame and moves around, it even works if the subject gets temporarily covered by other things that can appear in a frame such as tree branches, chain link fence for example, etc..

A very simple way to adjust only the skin without using qualifiers is by using a power window as seen in 6:20 of this video. This won't work in every situation but it is very easy to do and Davinci Resolve's auto tracking is an amazing tool for automating these tracking masks on a subject moving through a frame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWwmIwxd4YA

Sometimes for real complex shots where as you suggested an actor or whatever will go through lighting changes, etc.. you will have to use keyframes to adjust values within Davinci resolve to accommodate for changes in the part of the subject you are trying to isolate.

Sure it is time consuming, but not as time consuming as say trying to draw and animate masks manually in After Effects which is how I use to do it before I switched to Davinci Resolve. In Davinci Resolve, all this stuff is just way more efficient and expeditious to perform - especially when you're talking about pieces that are really long like TV episodes or feature films.



Some more online videos on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YLVG57wkfk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqTr_TuE-SY#t=88

 

[Dermot]

i tend to run the hue in my keys much tighter and much softer, so the width is 1 and the softness is 25, i find less chances of noise peaking through... luma & sat at 5, luma & sat soft at 5

i use this technique alot on a fine pass through a show, enough that i made a macro that turns on highlights, turns on a circle wipe, sets softness to 10, aspect up a bit, sets a skintone key as above, and parks the ui on the keyer, one button push on my Color Softkeys, and it all happens at the speed of 32 procesors... literaly a blink of the eye, i probbaly hit that button 300 times yesterday, again, literaly...

it's very rare that i would touch it on a base pass, or a trim pass, i save this stuff for when the DP is in the room - after the show is matching and basic creative decisions are in their happy place