Can you show a video on a good skin tone workflow?

Reading the training books and following you and Casey have been two of the biggest helps in my resolve Journey. Can't wait to continue to get better!

I'm never going to work as a pro but I am really enjoying your videos. I found you yesterday and watched about 10 of them. Thanks for your content.

I feel like all those ideas are great, and work just fine. My workflow is to look at the frame and decide what is the subject. ( usually a person ) And then ignore everything annoying and concentrate on the skin and exposure of the subject etc and grade it so that person looks the best that person can look. Then, if I wanted do anything like you have done here, my first instinct is to protect the subject, that now looks great and not do anything to alter that by fixing color on stuff that nobody will notice. So I would track a power window on the subject and make it pretty soft and invert it. As long as I am not adjusting wild exposure etc. and qualifying other areas - the subject is then protected Now at that point as in your first image - I would do the finishing with hue vs sat etc. The qualification would be the same, but no matter how close the actual color or luma value is the the skin - it won't affect it. The subject is where people are looking and I think using the method that you did, that in different circumstances there will be people trying to adjust hues that will change the skin and the idea will fall apart. And even if you look at it and think that it is okay with pulling sat out of reds etc., it creates a problem in being consistent and matching other different angles of the same subject. With stuff I have done the one thing that people notice, is slight differences in skin tone.

hundred percent agree on this. i basically try to avoid using keys whenever it is possible. as for the highlights situation, i recently tend to use "hdr" grade and just pull the highlights in there.

Thank you - as always, incredibly helpful suggestions.

Wow I was just going through this yesterday on TAC and noticed a lot of colorist using the qualifier tool, such as Nirali Kushkov and Nazareno Neris heck I even saw Walter use it. And that made me wonder “what would Cullen think about this” so it is great to see this and I look forward to friday. I used to abuse qualifiers but now find myself actively trying to avoid them. I got stuck in this “trend” of having to push my images to some ungodly place to match some kind of look which it was never intended for which then in turn meant the subject needed to be qualified (which is wrong as we should be focusing on the subject) From watching your channel, and watching some of the other leading colorists in the world I’ve learnt it’s about respecting the footage and the DoP. Sometimes we have to use the qualifier and I like the examples you showed as you qualified things that weren’t the subject and I think that’s the best way to look at it. If we need to qualify the subject (like I used to do) we have may have gone a little to far. This topic always interests me as we hear Jill B. Talk about how many windows, keys and qualifiers were used for The Joker. So it would be really interesting to see or know what she meant by this… or have a little look at that project ahaha. Anyways thanks man, look forward to Friday

Lots of great info i just wished you had a the waveform visible. Maybe use a picture in picture and put your photo in a circle top right?? Thanks for the info though.

Thanks for such a useful video! Please make a video on how to make and work with a show LUT.

I learn so much from your presentations!! looking for you next grade school video!!

Love it, bought the voyager luts pro package to support you :)

Thank u so much sir for putting so much effort into it....♥

Sooo helpful. Simplicity rules!

Another great tutorial, thanks Cullen! Hovewer I have a quiestion about shot 2 (bicycle shot). I feel that I would use another channel to qualify first - a saturation - just because when analizing this shot I think there no other red areas like this so much saturated. Or maybe use the combinaton of Lum and Sat channels to highlight it wih less time spent on working with the parameters. I understand that more channels I would use - more things I have to take care of, aspecially in acpect of some possible artefacts taking place, but in this exact case it probably would be a lot easier to add qualification by Sat.

a qualifier AND a powerwindow?!?! SACRALIGE!!! ;) on a serious note- would you worry about the green chromatic aberration that became more visible when you lowered the lights in the last shot? The softness helped for sure but still felt like the green became more prominent when you lowered the luminance Excited for Friday!

ooh my God Dude Just saw your Video On BMD'S Color Management Tutorial today & out of no where found you & your Own Channel. This is gonna be fun to Learn from you.

Cullen! Love your videos!! Weird node question, when going back to an older project, Is there a way to tell "exactly" what changes and adjustments you made in a node (maybe in a list or file)? Or do you just click on a node and look around the color page to see what you've changed from the default settings. I hope I explained this question properly

Hi Cullen. You're early this week! 😁 I feel like the Color Warper™ is more intuitive than the qualifier sliders and possibly more accurate. Any thoughts? See you Friday!

I've also heard you talking trash about "negative Phil". It's not right that you keep referring to him as being a bit shady. He's now disappeared into the dark night and I'm really worried about him. He's been trying so hard to be positive but people in the industry just keep seeing him in a negative light.

Hey there, Cullen. Big fan of all your work, I've been asking questions around the channel a few times and would love to know more about your take on workflows with qualifiers. I'm finding it hard to implement your technique with pulling qualifiers within my color managed workflow (meaning, inside my in & out CST nodes) as the colors get often mixed up when they really shouldn't, i.e. a clearly red shirt, when eye dropped, selects too much of my subject's skin when in reality the shirt has way more saturation and are different hues (similar, but clearly different) to the skin, thus the qualifier should've picked this up. And that does seem to be the case when I make that qualifier selection after my CST out of DWG. So is there something I'm missing here to be implementing your technique? I've also picked up that when you enter the highlight view to check your selection, the signal being fed into that node doesn't seem to be in log format/has a clear distinction between colors. Because when I qualify within my color management, the highlight view always picks up from the log image in DWG (since the image signal has only been through the CST in node from my camera color space to DWG). Is there a prior setting that needs to be done? Am I doing something wrong? Would love any tips or other links to your videos that might shine a light on this matter. Thanks! - Evan

this is sick

8:07 is it possible to key frame qualifiers in DR? 🤔

Wow, thanks Cullen. Now I know the correct way to use qualifiers. Never realized how poorly I was using them before.

Hi Cullen, I have a noob question. I’ve been binge watching your series and its soooo good! However, im just a little confuse about this. If my monitor specs states that its 100% srgb accurate and nothing about rec 709, do I set my color output to srgb or is rec 709 the correct setting? Thanks!

Hey Cullen-- Random question non-related to this video. I've recently began working in a color managed timeline after devouring your content. However, I'm running into a problem where I'm cutting already graded footage with new material that needs to be color managed. When I add a clip onto the timeline, my color managed space ruins the look of the footage, and even when I bypass the color management it looks washed out compared to what it looks like on its own. How can I mitigate this? Appreciate all you do.

Another very good video! I have a question, is this the same workflow when you're color grading 8 bit footage? If not, how do you color grade an 8 bit footage? Thanks man!

Hi Cullen, I have a question for you. I was watching the movie Knives Out. When you look a the skin of the actors, am I seeing the skin look very sharp or is that noise. It almost as if you can see the pores of the actors skin. I'm curious, is that just the camera that is being used or did the colorist create this in post. If its created in post how is this done? Thanks in advance

Does the 3D keyer offer any cleaner an approach to keying vs the HSL key? I don't often pull keys in general, so I'm not studied on the differences between the two.

Cullen does a video on qualifiers: So, I'll use a powerwindowwww.... Classic Cullen

Cullen ... what is your jaw routine. That is an immaculate jaw muscle my guy

Why not use the sat adjustment in the qualifier to hit the red lights? They should be far more saturated than the woman's face and allow for some pretty good isolation, I'd think.

Man, I love your tutorials - but you need more light in your main shot! I'll watch whether or not your take that on board, of course ;)

You should have more subscribers. Your content makes all these concepts really “click” for me

Hi Cullen, I have a suggestion for a great tutorial. Is there a way to know what LUTS in DR are Camera LUTS designed to convert from LOG to Rec 709 and the Creative LUTS designed to work on footage already converted to REC 709? If so, is there is a way to label them or group them in different folders within DR17/18? Thanks.