If you thought that adjusting simple things such as exposure, contrast or playing with curves would really behave in similar manner across different NLEs, well guess again.
I always thought that yellowish-greenish dark skin tones & magenta bright skin tones were (yet) another Sony quirk. Interestingly the image out of the camera was fine but as soon as I made a change in the Lumetri panel, skin would turn into this deadly color. So while I was about to create an LUT to fix them I tested Resolve and FCPX and lo and behold I could not reproduce these awful tones!
What’s the deal then? After testing extensively these programs I found out that all three behave differently!
Resolve: gain changes all three channels with the same multiplicative factor. While that creates nice desaturated shadows, skin highlights have a problem since the red channel clips first and then green follows creating these yellowish hues.
FCPX: exposure is just an additive term on all three channels, so while you would not notice something funny with small changes, larger changes in shadows clip the blue & green channels first creating reddish shadows and larger changes in the highlights result in the same yellowish hues as in Resolve but to a smaller extent.
Premiere (Lumetri Color): Exposure tries to be smart with a heavily nonlinear response so highlights remain white. While highlights look indeed more white compared to Resolve & FCPX (maybe a bit magenta?) the problem is that during an exposure decrease the red channel is lowered apparently too fast and skin tones become yellow-green.
While exposure, contrast, curves in Lumetri color panel suffer from this, the classic old style Brightness & Contrast Effect in Premiere behaves the same as FCPX and adjusts levels by shifting all channels with an additive term. This results to better skin tones, so if you want to adjust contrast or reduce exposure in Premiere you should use this effect and avoid using the exposure/contrast/curves in Lumetri color panel. FCPX should only be used for very minor color correction if at all, although I could not test any plugins. Resolve if exposure or contrast is increased has the worse highlight clipping, but that can be easily remedied with the Brightness/Saturation curve. Add the selective slight desaturation of skin tones, and you have the best looking skin tones out of the bunch.
Here are the ungraded tests with only some exposure changes under natural light (artificial light makes the differences more obvious):
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Long story short, if you want to achieve the best skin tones grade in Resolve. But I guess most of you already knew that right?
I always thought that yellowish-greenish dark skin tones & magenta bright skin tones were (yet) another Sony quirk. Interestingly the image out of the camera was fine but as soon as I made a change in the Lumetri panel, skin would turn into this deadly color. So while I was about to create an LUT to fix them I tested Resolve and FCPX and lo and behold I could not reproduce these awful tones!
What’s the deal then? After testing extensively these programs I found out that all three behave differently!
Resolve: gain changes all three channels with the same multiplicative factor. While that creates nice desaturated shadows, skin highlights have a problem since the red channel clips first and then green follows creating these yellowish hues.
FCPX: exposure is just an additive term on all three channels, so while you would not notice something funny with small changes, larger changes in shadows clip the blue & green channels first creating reddish shadows and larger changes in the highlights result in the same yellowish hues as in Resolve but to a smaller extent.
Premiere (Lumetri Color): Exposure tries to be smart with a heavily nonlinear response so highlights remain white. While highlights look indeed more white compared to Resolve & FCPX (maybe a bit magenta?) the problem is that during an exposure decrease the red channel is lowered apparently too fast and skin tones become yellow-green.
While exposure, contrast, curves in Lumetri color panel suffer from this, the classic old style Brightness & Contrast Effect in Premiere behaves the same as FCPX and adjusts levels by shifting all channels with an additive term. This results to better skin tones, so if you want to adjust contrast or reduce exposure in Premiere you should use this effect and avoid using the exposure/contrast/curves in Lumetri color panel. FCPX should only be used for very minor color correction if at all, although I could not test any plugins. Resolve if exposure or contrast is increased has the worse highlight clipping, but that can be easily remedied with the Brightness/Saturation curve. Add the selective slight desaturation of skin tones, and you have the best looking skin tones out of the bunch.
Here are the ungraded tests with only some exposure changes under natural light (artificial light makes the differences more obvious):
Long story short, if you want to achieve the best skin tones grade in Resolve. But I guess most of you already knew that right?
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