Question about skin tones and Vectorscope reading

[Duke Sweden]

ok, great. Now, you see that dominant tree behind me “stage left”? On my monitor it’s a golden brown, and the entire image has a golden yellow tint to it. Is that how it looks on your monitor? The tree is actually grayish. If that’s how it looks on your monitor then I can just adjust my monitor so it looks more true to life and I’ll be as calibrated as someone like me needs it to be.

Dell XPS 8920
Intel i7 core 7700 build
GeForce GTX 1050ti
32 Gigs of RAM
3 7200 RPM SATA Drives
Windows 10 64-bit
DaVinci Resolve 14.3

[Chris Wright]

lol, you can’t calibrate your screen based off of another’s person’s memory color or what they think it should look like.
my tree is a little yellow because on the right side, I wanted the sunny yellow leaves like around 800am on a bright sunny day and the warm wall off the house. that being said, nothing is past 128 film print saturation, so if anything looks garish, then your saturation looks too high as all colors are no more saturated than the most colorful possible painting on a wall.

did my self calibration chart help you at all? resolve has a built in auto color chart so you can compare memory colors
to what your actually getting. If I made an educated guess based upon you saying that the tree is grey and that I lowered reds by -31 for skin tone, and factored in then the camera’s sensor probably reacts similarly to yellow, this image would be more inline for memory colors. also, your white point should be D65 sRGB when encoded.

[Duke Sweden]

Hmmm? What? Oh, sorry. I don’t care about this anymore. I’m makin’ paper airplanes! ????
Seriously, Chris, you lost me a while ago. While I appreciate your level of knowledge I know I’ll never get that anal, for lack of a better word, about color grading to within an inch of legally acceptable levels. When I think about it, except for that weird video of mine that sort of went viral, and which received a lot of praise for its skin tones, believe it or not, no one will ever watch my stuff except me so I might as well make it look good on my monitors.

Cheers!

Dell XPS 8920
Intel i7 core 7700 build
GeForce GTX 1050ti
32 Gigs of RAM
3 7200 RPM SATA Drives
Windows 10 64-bit
DaVinci Resolve 14.3

[Marc Wielage]

I’d use tracking windows to pull the guy out of the background, and consider using very slight defocus to shift our attention to the actor. But a lot depends on context and intent.

As to Waveform monitors: read what Steve Hullfish had to say in this free booklet written years ago for Tektronix. It applies mainly to Tek, but the general principles apply to all color corrections. First important point: the “skintone line” is not a skintone line.

A Guide to Using Waveform Monitors as Artistic Tools in Color Grading
https://www.tek.com/document/primer/guide-using-waveform-monitors-artistic-tools-color-grading-high-resolution

[Duke Sweden]

Thanks, Marc! I’ve always wanted to learn the technique for drawing myself out from the background (other than bokeh, of course). I’ll have to look up a tut on it. Cheers!

Dell XPS 8920
Intel i7 core 7700 build
GeForce GTX 1050ti
32 Gigs of RAM
3 7200 RPM SATA Drives
Windows 10 64-bit
DaVinci Resolve 14.3

[Jorge Ferraro martin]

Thank you Marc, what a great guide. I will share it if you dont mind.

Color / Media Production Professional in Buenos Aires, Argentina
info@ferrarom.com