Tips on skin tone color correction for this image?

[Oliver Peters]

Is this clip before or after your correction? If you are doing the correction, are you using the color wheels and/or hue/sat curves?

There are matching issues with the cameras, especially the wide shot. I suspect you are fighting the bounce from the blue lights hitting that wall in the background. This will likely require a basic correction and then a mask with secondary correction for his face.

If you’ll notice, there’s no real contrast separation in his facial features, so any basic overall correction you apply is going to tend to look plastic and pasty. Increase the contrast for his face and reduce saturation for lows and highs slightly, then work on the mids.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’d try playing with the Hue vs Hue curve and pulling the magenta out, then use maybe a colour selection mask to isolate his skin tones and tweak from there but there’s really not a lot to work with in the original as far as correction goes.

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Julie Turner]

To clarify, the clip I linked to is before I’ve tried any correction. Presumably that’s how it was created by CNN? Thanks for the tips; will try both of your suggestions and see what I come up with. As Oliver mentioned, the face is so washed out it just looks strange and unreal.

[Julie Turner]

Oh, sorry, that was Jeff that said that about the face being low contrast … (wish there was an edit button here).

[Julie Turner]

Hi everybody,

Well, I got somewhere with a keyframed mask of his face, thanks so much. It’s so far from great, but at least it’s now not abysmal! Here’s before and after:

I’ll tweak it more if I get a chance (clearly there’s a lot that still needs work with the feather area)…

[Oliver Peters]

You can also try the hue/sat curves to pick the color of the face and make adjustments within the mask. That way the feathering will be less of an issue, because it’s not overall. But be careful, because if you go too extreme with curves it will introduce banding.

Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Jeff Kirkland]

There’s trick to editing…. click to reply to your own post, then you’ll get an edit link under the original message. Took me a couple of years to find that.

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Bret Williams]

Or click the word “edit” right under your post.

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[Jeff Kirkland]

The option doesn’t always show up – or it doesn’t for me anyway – and replying to your own post is the workaround.

—-
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer & Cinematographer
Hobart, Tasmania | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Joe Marler]

Here is about two min. of work using color wheels and vector scope to place a cropped facial region roughly on the skin tone line. I also used a static shape mask to reduce the IRE level of his face to the recommended 45-65 level and increase contrast, then used the mask “outside” setting to bring down the background to match that.

Here is a Larry Jordan video that discusses cropping to a skin region for color correction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX45Yi1spY4