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Exposing the "right" skintone


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Hey guys,

 

How are you exposing skintones on a digital sensor? I know the principles should be the same as exposing for film, and a skintone should look good most of the times if you're using something like False Color to nail exposure, but sometimes you need the scene to be dark. Take the example below. Would you expose for the "right" skintone (let's say around 70 IRE) and take it down in post or would you expose for the end result? I'm asking this because digital cameras interpret skin tones differently according to where they fall in the waveform and sometimes, if I expose for the end result, I get very little headroom in post to push some colors without unwanted noise.

 

Here's an example:

 

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Why not lower your ISO setting by half.  800 to 400 maybe.

Using this method, you can view your dark image on set and have room for color correction later.

I wouldn't rely on false color graphs for your facial exposures unless you are shooting in full sunlight perhaps.

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Expose for the mood you want -- at a base ISO that gives you a minimal noise level that you can accept -- and then avoid changing your mind in post and brightening the overall shot or the shadows.

A face can move through a room and fall into all sorts of levels depending on the lighting, which is natural.  

If you want more flexibility with pushing colors, use a lower ISO rating but then watch your clipping.

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Thanks! Good advices. Exposing with digital sensors kind of changed a lot of the reality in the way we light. Are you guys using practicals (not everytime of course) as main lights or just as motivation for other bigger lights? (not counting HMIs for sun light). I've been reading that more and more DPs are using practicals on their own to light a scene.

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Practical lamps can work... if your subject is close enough to them.  Generally,  I make use of practicals, but almost always augment them with something else, otherwise, the practical lamps can overwhelm the scene.

I do though, light for digital capture at much higher contrast ratios than I used to use with film/analog finish.  With a digital color correction, I find that I can use a bit more of dynamic range than I could get away with in the olden film days ?

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On a film negative, the shadows and bright highlights are lower in contrast compared to the midtones thanks to the characteristic curve, but print stock is designed to create deep blacks when a bright light shines through it onto a screen, so shadows in a print from a negative drop to black below a certain level, and even if they didn't, grain in the shadows makes it less flexible to lift in digital color-correction of the negative compared to shadows on a digital image.  On the other hand, film has a long roll-off to white in bright highlights compared to digital.

So most of the complaints about digital have been grayish blacks in digital projection and overly open shadows in cameras like the Alexa, hence more people talk about getting good blacks with digital than they ever did with film.  In the early days of digital, any LUT I created was basically contrasty in the shadows to get good blacks but flat in the highlights to retain overexposure detail.

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1 hour ago, David Mullen ASC said:

On a film negative, the shadows and bright highlights are lower in contrast compared to the midtones thanks to the characteristic curve, but print stock is designed to create deep blacks when a bright light shines through it onto a screen, so shadows in a print from a negative drop to black below a certain level, and even if they didn't, grain in the shadows makes it less flexible to lift in digital color-correction of the negative compared to shadows on a digital image.  On the other hand, film has a long roll-off to white in bright highlights compared to digital.

So most of the complaints about digital have been grayish blacks in digital projection and overly open shadows in cameras like the Alexa, hence more people talk about getting good blacks with digital than they ever did with film.  In the early days of digital, any LUT I created was basically contrasty in the shadows to get good blacks but flat in the highlights to retain overexposure detail.

Ah yes, completely agree with that! BTW, how do you correct for contrast in digital sensors? Do you create a custom LUT or use the contrast ratio with pivot? Or maybe a luma curve?

 

Thanks!

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