Sony skin tones

Samuel H

Samuel H

Major Contributor
I still read people complaining about Sony's skin tones, and I really, really, really don't get it.

I just shot this piece last week with my RX100 IV in 4k. I used my Flaat settings (slog2 with cinema color, increased saturation and some specific color tweaks). And I graded it with a single, relatively simple, RGB curve. Nothing more. Just a curve. Not even a WB adjustment in post (I shot with custom WB, and the lighting was the same in all shots; you'll see it's not the most exciting video ever, just a showcase of great craftmanship; but it's slow and there's plenty of skin in it, so it's perfect for this).

With just that, I see the skin tones here and they look really good to me. I'm also editing a piece that was shot by somebody else with a 5D3+H.264 and L zooms, and it's just night and day: the canon skin tones are correct, but there's no texture anywhere, even in closeups. It looks plasticky to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omd1tcfW6zI

 
Sam-

The Sony RX100mk4 1" sensor looked really good.

And you are right, I thought your skin tones were lovely.

(If it matters, I was watching on a small skin)

And those costumes...WOW!

If I may ask, any idea of your ISO in most of those shots?

Again, nice piece.

Be well.

Rob
Smalltalk.Productions
 
Thanks. I thought I might not be seeing something that was important to other people, so it's nice to see I'm not alone here.

All of this was shot at ISO 1600 (the minumum for slog2 on the RX100 IV) and 1/50s. Almost everything is at f/4 (I closed down a bit if the costume was almost-white or very reflective). Pointing the camera at a grey card with these settings, the meter said "+1", which is how I like to expose my stuff (i.e. I do as if it was ISO 800 instead of 1600).

Also: I shot at 30 fps and conformed to 24 fps. I wish I had 4k 60 fps available, since it would have made them look more stable in some shots. I did use 4k for reframing some shots, but maybe going 1080p 60fps would have been a better idea than 4k 30fps.
 
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I've shot hundreds of interviews with my FS700 and I haven't had
problems with skin tones. Sony skin tones seem to be a common complaint from
Canon shooters so take from that what you may 😉. If you expose
skin tones too 'high' they can be a pain but other than that it's not
hard to get them looking good (keeping in mind skin reflects light from
almost everything and you need to watch out for that too.). Those are issues
with any camera though.
 
As long as the camera makers keep giving us plenty of menu controls over the color it all evens out in the wash. I really like the look of my PX270 which I have bent all around using the color correction & matrix controls. I happened to pick up a Sony RX10 II last year for the 240fps. Much to my surprise after tweaking, the two cameras can look very similar which means the $1,000 Sony looks darn good for the money.
 
the new sony cameras have weird color to me. Skin looks lifeless, it's almost like it's not registering any of the blood under the skin or something, like the warmth of our flesh. Even with color correction and under their different color profiles, these new cameras are not picking up something like their older cameras are. Even when someone tries to compensate for it, it just looks like an added tint to the problem.
 
Hanriverprod said:
the new sony cameras have weird color to me. Skin looks lifeless, it's almost like it's not registering any of the blood under the skin or something, like the warmth of our flesh. Even with color correction and under their different color profiles, these new cameras are not picking up something like their older cameras are. Even when someone tries to compensate for it, it just looks like an added tint to the problem.
Click to expand...

I think most of that is simply down to people shooting slog profiles with 8-bit recording - it robs midtones and skintones of any real tonality, and then people are also overexposing their log images, which takes even more tonality out and pushes skintones into the most compressed parts of the slog curves.

It's a recipe for plasticy, lifeless looking skin.

Look at that same Sony colour science applied to 10-16-bit footage from the higher end Sonys and it yields some of the nicest skintones out there.
 
Hanriverprod said:
the new sony cameras have weird color to me. Skin looks lifeless, it's almost like it's not registering any of the blood under the skin or something, like the warmth of our flesh. Even with color correction and under their different color profiles, these new cameras are not picking up something like their older cameras are. Even when someone tries to compensate for it, it just looks like an added tint to the problem.
Click to expand...
Do you see that problem in the video I posted?


@Grug: the most compressed parts of the slog curves are in the shadows, you put your skin there if you DON'T overexpose. In any case, I think the problem is not the gamma curve (my video above was shot with slog2) but the color profile (sgamut is awful unless you're really good at applying the official post treatments, and with cinema -for example- leaving saturation at standard values still means you have to add tons of it in post and it's easy to get it wrong in camera or break the image in post).
 
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Samuel H said:
Do you see that problem in the video I posted?


@Grug: the most compressed parts of the slog curves are in the shadows, you put your skin there if you DON'T overexpose. In any case, I think the problem is not the gamma curve (my video above was shot with slog2) but the color profile (sgamut is awful unless you're really good at applying the official post treatments, and with cinema -for example- leaving saturation at standard values still means you have to add tons of it in post and it's easy to get it wrong in camera or break the image in post).
Click to expand...

It's a little harder to tell with the make-up and lights but yeah it looks a little anemic to me. What did you shoot that pool party music video? I would guess Sony because the colors look dull to me unless you shot it with a canon and did some processing to deaden it. Still, it looks fantastic, and I enjoyed it so what does it really matter to the average person. Out of the prosumer cameras to me Sony looks worst < Panasonic < Samsung < Canon. Still, I see people doing great stuff with any of those cameras, so at this point, it's just nitpicking and no one is right, and those with talent will reap the rewards and the rest will piss and moan about how the tech is limited.
 
Haha, yes, the pool party is fun XDD
Not the best to look at skin tones because that one does have lots of workin post (well, not lots, but at least a MB Looks preset and some tweaks and whatnot). This one is better for this because it's just an RGB curve, nothing more. Anyway, the pool party is RX100 IV as well.
Interesting thoughts, thanks. I don't see it, but who knows.
 
That horizontal axis is in linear terms, which is not very useful if you ask me.
So: yes, if you think of the linear output from the sensor, the higher you go, the more data you're throwing out. But that's just because linear is awfully inefficient, much more so the higher you go. Half the values of your linear scale are used to store the brightest stop of light. Yes, I want to throw most of that away.

This image that I created with LUTcalc has the horizontal axis in stops of light, which makes more sense because that's closer to how your eyes work, not how the sensor works.
slog.jpg
 
MKV colors look fine to me.


And I am sure MKVI, VII and VIII will be even better. And all will be out before Christmas.
 
Samuel H said:
@Grug: the most compressed parts of the slog curves are in the shadows, you put your skin there if you DON'T overexpose. In any case, I think the problem is not the gamma curve (my video above was shot with slog2) but the color profile (sgamut is awful unless you're really good at applying the official post treatments, and with cinema -for example- leaving saturation at standard values still means you have to add tons of it in post and it's easy to get it wrong in camera or break the image in post).
Click to expand...

Not sure I follow you there Sam, the whole point of a logarithmic gamma curve (as I understand it), is to compress the highlights of a linear curve in order to get a more even distribution of bits across the tonal range of the image (as a linear gamma, would simply double the bits required with each progressive stop, allocating a vast number of bit to the brightest stops, which are basically white anyway, so hardly need them).

Where have you heard that the shadows are the most compressed parts of the curve? That doesn't make sense to me.
 
It depends on how you define "compression".

You're thinking about how much info from the sensor is being thrown away, and in that sense yes, it's the highlights that give you the most compression. But that's not a problem at all: the info you're throwing away is basically useless to begin with.

I'm thinking about the knee in the shadows in the graph I posted. With 8-bit slog2, you have 29 brightness values per stop of light in the top 7 stops of your image, and just 11 brightness values per stop of light on your bottom 4 stops of light. That's the kind of compression I want to avoid: the knee in the shadows. What I'm saying is that I don't want to put my talent in those 4 stops of light at the bottom.
 
Hanriverprod said:
It's a little harder to tell with the make-up and lights but yeah it looks a little anemic to me. What did you shoot that pool party music video? I would guess Sony because the colors look dull to me unless you shot it with a canon and did some processing to deaden it. Still, it looks fantastic, and I enjoyed it so what does it really matter to the average person. Out of the prosumer cameras to me Sony looks worst < Panasonic < Samsung < Canon. Still, I see people doing great stuff with any of those cameras, so at this point, it's just nitpicking and no one is right, and those with talent will reap the rewards and the rest will piss and moan about how the tech is limited.
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I agree with you. With all respect to Samuel, his video looks beautiful but there just seems to be something missing on those skin tones. It’s hard to pinpoint, but it just doesn’t look natural, perhaps a little bit too faded. I own Sony cameras (a7sii and a6300) I also own a Canon 1dx mark ii. Although I love my Sony cameras, the 1dxii smashes them when it comes to skin tones. A friend of mine who always shot with Canon switched to Sony and did a job for one of his regular clients and after filming with the Sony, the client said, “Phil, I love your work, but in the last video I looked like a character from the Walking Dead.” In my opinion, he did a good job with the skin tones but I give credit where it’s due and Canon cannibalizes Sony in that area. If it was obvious that skin tones are great in a Sony, the OP wouldn’t have made this thread in order to convince us that Sony has great skin tones.
 
I get a bit tired of reading those three words. And I think Samuel's video looks fine. ( I wouldn't ever use You Tube compression to fully judge a camera's ability to render skin tones)
I think in the hands of a craftsmen, and in a blind test - most of us would be hard pressed to identitfy Sony, Canon, Panasonic, etc skin tones. And certainly more compressed codecs & lower bit rates probably have as much to do with tonality in skin as the brand of camera being used to capture it.
 
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