What are setting to play with for skin?

O

oxband

Well-known member
i've been doing a lot of closeups of people I'm interviewing, and I feel like their skin is often a bit soft when I get home and watch the footage. This problem has been most noticeable on either white skin or a light skinned person of color.

Which settings do I want to play with on my camera to make skin as crisp as possible (metaphorically speaking of course....)? I was thinking of raising Detail Coring. Is that wise? Are there other settings to think of playing with?
 
Barry's tips are where you want to start - I'd also suggest you hook the 150 up to the biggest HDMI TV you can get your hands on, even a 32" would be useful... and do some tests. Grab a subject, set up your usual lighting, play with the settings (reference Barry's book for what each setting really does and its usefulness) and take plenty of notes. You don't even need to roll footage to dial in some looks and understand what's happening with settings - you should be able to get closer to what you want pretty quickly.

For detail in facial closeups, the problem may be focus - people move when they speak, and you may have faces leaving the focal plane's sweet spot. So watch your DOF and F stop as well.

I've got a 22" consumer TV and a wall-arm adapted to fit a rolling stand... I often take that to studio sets for checking focus; with an HDMI splitter, I can dial the TV in reasonably close to my calibrated (but small) monitor. Clients really appreciate it (and it looks kind of badass to 'em, for a couple hundred bucks). Hardest thing is finding a case for the TV! But it's kind of handy on set.
 
If you're not getting enough out of just the detail setting, then you can add the v detail too. V detail only affects vertical detail, whereas the detail level affects both horizontal and vertical. And v detail is dependent on the overall detail level; the higher you set detail level, the more effect the v detail level will have.
 
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