Regardless of ethnicity, pigmentation, or complexion, healthy skin occupies a remarkably narrow range of hues and saturations. Thankfully, our brains respond very precisely to this range, so finding the boundaries is almost diagnostic. It turns out this is simpler and less subjective than you’d think. Now that we have a baseline definition for skin tone in general, let’s go further and quantify what exactly makes it “good” or “bad?” So for the purposes of our discussion, I’m going to define skin tone as the reproduced range of hues and saturations in our subject’s skin. Terms like tone mapping, tonal ranges, and split-toning all refer to the grayscale curve of our image, rather than color properties like hue or saturation.īut when we talk about skin tone, hue and saturation are actually the two biggest factors, with contrast and brightness coming in at a distant third. In virtually any other context in color grading, “tone” refers to the contrast or brightness component of our image. One of the reasons skin tone is so misunderstood is that the term itself is a bit of a misnomer. What is skin tone?īefore we dive in, we need to clarify some definitions.
In today’s article, we’ll look at five strategies for achieving pleasing and lifelike skin tones. We may recognize what healthy skin tones look like, but figuring out how to get it is something else entirely. That said, great-looking skin tone is an elusive, mercurial ideal, especially when we step into the world of digital video workflows. Poor quality skin tones can communicate something about our characters and stories that we don’t intend. So it’s our right (even duty) to be so preoccupied with skin tone. We may not know the precise color a particular house, or garment of clothing, or landscape should be, but we know exactly what healthy skin looks like. Humans are fine tuned to the details of other humans, and we pick up on even minor visual variations from what our brain tells us it should look like. Why? Because our eyes are highly adapted to evaluating skin tone. Faces and skin are present in the majority of images we shoot, and they’re generally the most important feature that draws the viewer’s eye. We painstakingly organize lenses, cameras, lighting, and color grading tools strictly by this single factor - and for good reason. Skin tone might be the most discussed and sought-after creative aspect of motion images among filmmakers.
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