Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

Fixing skin tone with Vectorscopes in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we are going to use Premiere Pro's Vector scopes, to try and correct skin. We're going to make a little mask, and we're going to look at our Lumetri Vector scope, then we're going to try and get this little blob here to run parallel with the Skin Tone indicator here. It's another great way to use our Vector scope, let's jump in. 

For this one, we're going to go back and grab the one we made, we worked on earlier, when we changed the color, it's called 'Color Correction C', bring that in, turn into a sequence. I've started a new project, I'm going to zoom in using my backslash key, ' \ ' on the Timeline, so we can see it all. What we want to do is, to fix the Skin Tone, we need to find the Skin Tone, like we did with the white paper, find a good shot, you see, it kind of gets out of focus there, not good, probably there at the beginning, this great place, and just like we did before, we need to go to our 'Effect Controls', find 'Opacity', create a mask using either of these. 

I'm going to use the Ellipse, that always ends up the shape of the clip. Come on, Adobe. I wish it was just circular, I can't figure out a way of doing that, if you do know, let me know in the comments, otherwise we just end up with like weird circles all the time. So I've got a selection here, kind of, there we go, I'm going to go back to my Lumetri Scopes, remember, if you haven't got them on, right click it using this one here, 'Vectorscope YUV'. It's showing us our colors of our skin. 

Now see this line here, I briefly talked about it, this line here is showing-- that's the kind of line in there, it's called the Skin Tone Line, actually, I think it's called the Skin Tone Indicator. It's got a few lines, it's just a helpful reference that-- skin tones look great along here, at the moment it's kind of pushed a little bit that way, towards red, you're like, "No, no, no, I can see now, it's easy." So I'm going to move it a little bit this way. 

So to adjust it there's a couple of ways, Temperature is a nice easy way, often, if it's just subtle adjustments, you can drag one of these, let's try the top one, top one left and right, not the right one. If I drag it out there I can get it closer to the line. I'm going to show you why that's not a great idea, in a second. Double click it to get it back, or this one here, oh, it's this one, see there, get right up that line there, and let's turn our 'Effects Control', 'Opacity, 'Effects' off. Let's go over here, turn the Effects on and off, you see a bit of a rentage?? to it. So that's a way of using the Vector scopes, to get your skin tones in line. Actually, let me show you the other way. 

So I'm going to double click both of these to get back, instead of using the Temperature you can use your Curves, and you can use your Hue Saturation Curves, that we looked at before, and we can use this Hue Hue, Hue versus Hue. We can use the Eyedropper tool, to say, sample that color, please, we're right there. So let's grab the kind of skin tones that are actually there, and you can move it up and down. Can you see, on the Vector scope, to move it around, so you can kind of get it close there, there you go. Kind of watching a bit of both of them, and again, let's turn the Effect Controls on and off, he's got a bit yellow, what do you think? 

Now that brings me to the next thing, is I'm going to turn that back on, and let's go to our Lumetri Scopes. Can you see, we kind of understand, I hope we understand a little bit, like when we're heading towards yellow and red, we can kind of adjust this to swing it around. Mine's not adjusting, please hold. All right, we're back. So you can see, I can kind of swing it back and forth, so that's kind of, yeah, swinging the color, but what is the difference between, like the center, and all the way out here, this is how saturated something is, and when we're using, in terms of skin tones, how far that out, closer, how closer to the edge, is more saturated, and then the closer it is to the white, or the center, is the wider it is. 

So let's just have a look at the Basic Correction. I'm going to grab 'Saturation', can you see, you can drag it in and out. So skin tones are, it depends on your complexion, so with my kind of white skin, it looks best at just about halfway, about 45, 35% of like halfway, it's a guess, it's not 100%, but if you have a darker skin tone, like this guy, it's closer to the center. So you end up being like a third, or, I don't know, 30% along this line, as a rough guess, just so you know. 

Our one at the moment probably needs to come down just a tiny bit, not because it's, you know, it's hard to tell on the line, this is an aid to help us, it's not going to give us exactly, but we also knew, because it looked a bit yellow, out here, was the right tone, but maybe the wrong strength. So now we can use that Lumetri Scope to know that we're kind of close, we use the visuals here to kind of confirm it, and again, in the Scopes, we want to be along this line, and how far along this line? You don't want to be at half, you're going to end up looking over saturated, if you've got light skin, kind of just below, halfway between these two lines, and if it's darker skin, the closer to this middle here. This one here, I think, still needs to come in just a touch. 

So to recap, draw the Opacity mask around a certain part of skin, and then start looking at your Scopes, to see where it is in relation to this line here, the Skin Line indicator, the indicator skin line, that thing there, and getting it as close on it, and then how far up that, in terms of the saturation, is determined on the skin color that you're working with. 

One thing that might throw you out is your mask, if you make a mask that's in a bad position, that's kind of, let's say I'm going to select my mask, it's in the kind of like, it's grabbing some background or some stubble, or that gap there, it's going to throw it out a little bit, you want to try and find a nice big patch of skin, cheeks, forehead, chin, something that's not-- it seems quite generic for that person. 

All right, let's leave that one there, let's move into the next video, where we actually look at a bit more real world example, we're looking at everything in isolation, let's start looking at, in kind of combination scopes. All right, I'll see you in the next video.