Teal and orange effect for darker skin tones?

[stanw]

I'm very new to color grading and have been reading tons of info on the subject. One of the things I kept coming across was the teal and orange effect. This had me wondering, since this look makes orangish skin tones stand out against teal shadows, what happens with darker skin toned people? Is there orangish tones in darker skin tones? Is there something else done to make the teal and orange effect work with darker skin tones? What is the teal and orange/complimentary color equivalent for darker skin toned people?

thanks.

 

[starcentral]

Hi stanw, I did some coloring recently on a short film mixed color skin actors and found that most of the time, the same color adjustment worked for both caucasian and darker colored skin. the reason for this is because most skin tones regardless of their color still fall into the "midtones" area of the full tonal curve. One tip is to keep your eye on the vectorscope which you can use as a guide to see the color and saturation you're adding to the skin color.

As you get into more advanced coloring,. remember that you can always use a combination of the qualifier tool and masks to isolate several people in a scene and work on their skin individually as well. I did this on a short film last year which has been making the rounds at several film festivals here in Canada called "Sal's Auto". Here's one of the quick demo's I made which shows the isolation of two actors in one scene, one with caucasian skin and the other with dark skin. (1:05 is where you see the work on the darker colored skin actor)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU14e9v5150

 

[Bruce Watson]

This had me wondering, since this look makes orangish skin tones stand out against teal shadows, what happens with darker skin toned people? Is there orangish tones in darker skin tones?

Skin tone is a largely the combination of various amounts of melanin and the red of blood under the skin. This is why there's a single skin tone line on a Vector scope, and all human skin tones fall on that line within a small range. That is, darker and lighter skin tones are nearly the same hue, the differences are mostly variations in level and saturation. This, you can easily prove to yourself in just about any color correction/grading package by manipulating the HSL values individually to see what they do. Don't be afraid to play with this stuff.

Also, ask any artist -- brown is also known as "dark orange".