Skin tones are too red

diego1235467

diego1235467

Well-known member
My DVX100a is making the reds and oranges look TOO red. It is also producing extremely red/orange skin tones. The only thing I found that corrected this was to set the chroma level to -7. Am I doing something wrong? Here are my settings that are giving me red skin tones. Please help.

DVX100a

Detail Level: -3
V. Detail: 0
Detail Coring: 0
Chroma Level: 0
Chroma Phase: 0
Color Temp: 0
Master Ped: -3
A. Iris Level: 0
Gamma: Cine Like V
Knee: Auto
Matrix: Cine Like
Skin Tone DTL: Off
V Detail Freq: Thin

What settings are best to have if color correction will be done in post?
 
All your settings should be fine, how are you white-balancing? You shouldn't have to go to chroma level -7 to get decent skin tones. Be sure to pull a proper manual white balance and verify, because those settings are fine. You could drop down from the cine-like matrix back to "norm" if you need even less color saturation.
 
Maybe that'll work.

I tried the daylight preset as well as manual wb. Both produced skin tones that were much too red.

Update: It didn't do much. When I white balance, and look at the skin tones, it looks like everyone has lipstick and severe cases of rosacea. Hell, the closest I get is with cine-like matrix set to normal, AND my chroma level at -7. I really don't know what to do.

By the way, I don't have a proper wb card, but I tried several different things (computer paper, walls, etc). Pretty much everything looks decent enough with computer paper, but no matter what I do, skin tones, reds, oranges, wood furniture, etc. look WAY too red.
 
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If I recall correctly, computer paper can have a slight blue to it that your eye does not see... that can effectively warm balance and play havoc with skin tones.

A proper white card is $5 from Porta Brace.
 
Presets are a starting point, under ideal sunlight/incandescent conditions. But if there's any decent degree of variance in the light temperature, or any mixing of color temps, the presets are useless.
 
Well, it will certainly rule out the problem of improper white balance.

Though, I guess the question that should have been asked at this point is, "Where are you seeing your camera's images that you notice the red skin tones?"

Are you watching on a broadcast monitor? On your desktop monitor within FCP or another NLE? On your camera's LCD? On an external production monitor on set/location?
 
diego1235467 said:
On the camera's lcd, viewfinder, and on my macbook pro with FCP.
Click to expand...

On some of the shots you posted to another thread, I really didn't see the 'radical' problem you seem to have. You were comparing your still camera shots to the resulting video, and for some set of the shots, my internal comment was, 'ok, looks ok to me'...

Of course there could be something wrong with your camera, and there could be some sort of service adjustment needed.

On the other hand, I've seen problems when playing material on a PC vs. Mac, because of different gammas for the two systems. However, these days, I almost always use Macs, and use a Spyder calibrator widget to calibrate my displays for still photo work. As a note, I am only interested in 'computer/internet' display of my video, so the fact that I'm not calibrating to NTSC, isn't that important to me.
 
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Well the problem I was having in the other thread was that the Chroma Phase was set to +4 or something, so everything looked magenta. Now it's just the reds, oranges, and skin tones that look really red.

*Update.

I don't know what just happened, but it looks great on my fcp window now. I've no idea what I did, but the skin tones are looking even better than my still camera.

It seems that my lcd and viewfinder are way off. Is there any way to calibrate them to be more accurate?
 
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