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Bad skin tones! (Pale or too red)

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Michael Frymus

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I see this issue a lot!
Not only have I encountered this myself, but I have seen many, many people go through this. I dont know what their results were after grading, so I cant say if its fixable or not in some cases.

Ive seen raw footage that looks amazing. Nearly perfect skin tones without any retouching, straight from the camera.
But other times its very red or very pale skin - even though have normal natural looking skin.

If its too pale, it becomes hard to add the red colour to make it look natural.
When its too red, its hard to remove it without looking fake.

Why does this happen?
Ill be posting some stills when I come across some. I'll probably pull some from the web.
 
Michael Frymus said:
I see this issue a lot!
Not only have I encountered this myself, but I have seen many, many people go through this. I dont know what their results were after grading, so I cant say if its fixable or not in some cases.

Ive seen raw footage that looks amazing. Nearly perfect skin tones without any retouching, straight from the camera.
But other times its very red or very pale skin - even though have normal natural looking skin.

If its too pale, it becomes hard to add the red colour to make it look natural.
When its too red, its hard to remove it without looking fake.

Why does this happen?
Ill be posting some stills when I come across some. I'll probably pull some from the web.
Click to expand...

Post R3D stills... Then we can see exactly what went wrong.

I have had some crazy mixed lighting situations that have always managed to be bought back to actual real life.
On lens filtration and different color temped lighting are the greatest causes of bad skin tones... but its always easier to blame the camera, or the colourist.

Send R3D stills... And all then analyse the reasons why your having issues pretty quickly. The magic of meta data and RAW. :)
 
Michael, is this personal experience? Because I have had an easy time. I think a lot of people are pretty heavy handed with coloring, it is a delicate thing...

Step 1: isolate skin in Davinci
Step 2: make it look however you want
 
pale sometimes has to do with a raw look, i.e. desaturated/flat
otherwise, color setting may not have been processed optimally (wrong white balance usually)
or there could be lighting/lens/filtration/makeup issues

and you really need to be doing cc/grade anyways, that's the whole point of processing r3d's

jake, nice two step process... haha ;)
it really is that simple
 
Ive looked through some of my footage but couldn't find a good example. I don't have many raw files with me so I may not have them. I'll keep looking. But Ive seen others. I worked on a show once and noticed that the skin tones were very red and not natural looking. There is a trailer of it somewhere. I'll look for it. It was color corrected after and it looks much better. But the raw looked bad
 
Michael Frymus said:
Ive looked through some of my footage but couldn't find a good example. I don't have many raw files with me so I may not have them. I'll keep looking. But Ive seen others. I worked on a show once and noticed that the skin tones were very red and not natural looking. There is a trailer of it somewhere. I'll look for it. It was color corrected after and it looks much better. But the raw looked bad
Click to expand...

Michael, RAW footage sometimes looks weird. It's RAW. It's data. What matters is it's gradeability. Not how it looks RAW. I work with Alexa S-Log stuff all the time, and that frequently looks like garbage too (grey, lifeless pulp). Again...its how much FLEXIBILITY you get at the time of capture that matters...that's all.

That's why, ironically, for those of us investing in HIGH END cameras...our ability to invest in grading (or talented colorists) is what will help us get the most out of our footage..as that's what it's designed for...TO BE GRADED.

Hope this helps!
 
I mostly agree but I found the old red MX to be legitimately a bit warmth-starved skin tone-wise and even the Alexa and C300 (with much crazier color profiles than the red from what I can tell) have odd skin tones at times... too green or too magenta.

I feel like the Epic is better in this regard. The Dragon looks much better.

I get this problem with all cameras under mixed lighting, low CRI fluorescents, and very late day skylight. Worse with digital than with film, oddly.
 
I've seen so many appalling grades in here (been guilty of a few of them too to be honest) that it's obvious the issue is far more to do with the post-process that the camera/aquisition end.

Guaranteed, every single 'grade my R3d' thread, one of the first posts will be a hypersaturated teal/cyan experiment with red unnatural faces even if that setup doesn't in any way suit the image.
 
Its not just with the red cameras though, and not just when shooting raw. I see it when people shoot on DSLRs too.
 
Mark Toia said:
... different color temped lighting are the greatest causes of bad skin tones...
Click to expand...


This has definitely been my problem with off the cuff shooting "just for fun." Try shooting a bar without bringing your own lights. Gotta choose which color temp to play in. Choose incorrectly and you'll be coloring forever.
 
I'd also argue the strength and quality of light plays a huge factor, not just mix lighting (although mixed is arguably the biggest offender).

Let me ask you this; in exterior/sunlight (regardless of the time of day) have you witnessed bad skin tones? Probably not. It's 4200-6500k+ (depending on the time of day), RGB channels are all strong, and there's a boatload of light. Even when you set the camera's colour temp way off, the skin tones still manage to look pretty strong. I think that says a lot; if you're not getting similar results with your artificial lights, it's more often than not the lighting itself and not the camera.

Also, watch that blue channel… It gets weak/blurry/soft really quickly (even in 5600k sources if they're not high enough CRI) and that can make for some sickly looking skin tones.
 
I have seen it happen most often when lighting is a mixed lighting scenario, the type where you just simply cant match location lighting with what you have on the truck, and your stuck with two color tones or more. Shoot a chip chart, you should be able to do something. Could be low CRI as well, and you just cant get that tone back out.
 
This reminds me of a BTS video from one of the Lord of the Rings installments where they talked about how they ended up painting everyone and everything on set redder because of the Red One's sensor characteristics. I never fully understood why they did that since other films didn't do that and ended up looking just fine.
 
Manfred Lopez said:
This reminds me of a BTS video from one of the Lord of the Rings installments where they talked about how they ended up painting everyone and everything on set redder because of the Red One's sensor characteristics. I never fully understood why they did that since other films didn't do that and ended up looking just fine.
Click to expand...

It was The Hobbit (An Unexpected Journey). They used Red Epic cameras in 3D rigs, not Red Ones, infamous "red camera eats color" as turned out wasn't so much the camera ifself, but the mirror in 3D rig. They added red to the makeup for tungsten-lit scenes and added all sorts of colors to "psychedelic" Mirkwood set to grade it down in post later. Just to clarify.
 
Vadim Bobkovsky said:
It was The Hobbit (An Unexpected Journey). They used Red Epic cameras in 3D rigs, not Red Ones, infamous "red camera eats color" as turned out wasn't so much the camera ifself, but the mirror in 3D rig. They added red to the makeup for tungsten-lit scenes and added all sorts of colors to "psychedelic" Mirkwood set to grade it down in post later. Just to clarify.
Click to expand...

Ah, good to know. So it was the mirror. This makes sense. I always suspected it wasn't the camera itself.
 
I have graded a lot of footage from RED, Sony, etc.
My experience is that anytime people shoot RED in tungsten or mixed environments, the gamut becomes much more restricted with respect to skin tones.
I just don't see the same level of dynamic range and nuance in the values around that area of the spectrum as compared to shooting in daylight. Even when the white balance has been properly set for Tungsten sources. What I have seen coming off of the Alexa or even SLOG from Sony just seems to have greater range in those circumstances. I cannot say why this is. I know that I often have to paint back in nuances with secondaries to emphasize the cheekbones or othewise people become flat and masklike. This may also have to do with the reflectance of the makeup that is used needing to be different for RED cameras. Who knows? Wouldn't be the first time.

This was certainly true with the original RED MX, less so with the Epic and as I strongly suspect, a non-issue with the Dragon sensor. It probably all comes down to dynamic range.

In any case, this is my experience and I am not saying it is necessarily anyone else's.
 
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