skin tone issues

[stef]

Hi guys, I have an issue with shooting skin tones that are extremely red (in this case a dark native american). I can't seem to grade the image where the skin tones look reasonable. I believe I was using halogens, although there was a little bit of mixed fluorescents which I tried to overpower.

Shooting with a canon dslr, I know they tend to saturate the reds a bit, but pulling out the reds messes with the wb in the rest of the image.

Is there a lighting or gelling or post technique to minimize this type of thing? I was thinking of maybe using a higher temp light for this guy, and lighting the rest with redheads. Would that help, or just make it worse?

I shot using cinestyle, which desaturates during the shoot, then resaturates the colors in post. Could this be part of the issue? I'm not stellar at doing color, and this just makes it really difficult.

 

[knightly]

The skin tones should fall on the "Flesh Line" in your vector scope. I just covered this in a different thread (although for a different problem). Temporarily crop your image to the key side cheek of your subject and change your color balance of the mids in your 3-way color corrector to land the color blob in the vector scope on the flesh line… then uncrop and it'll be "right" by the numbers. You can also desaturate just the reds slightly to help alleviate the problem without shifting the image too much… especially in the canons. When shooting, desaturate your image slightly in camera to help wrangle in the reds and make them more manageable later when color correcting.