This tool looks amazing! I'm really close to pulling the trigger on it. One quick question: have you tried to qualify say pink lips or the reds in skin in order to increase the complexity of the colors in the skin? Cheers!
Hello! That's an interesting question. The ability to qualify specific parts of the skin while avoiding others is dependent on how much variation is already there in the data, so your ability to do this well will likely vary a lot based on the shot. If your subject's lips start as a very similar color to their cheek, for example, then you'll find that you'll have a harder time selecting it and will have to use a smaller qualifier width to isolate one or the other in your selection. The smaller the width you use, the more likely your change will introduce visual tearing, since strong, highly isolated changes are most likely to test the limits of the depth of the data collected by the sensor. But if the lips are already significantly more red than the skin, and you want to push that further, then it would likely be pretty easy! In general, I'd say it's a balancing act on how much you can push the footage. If there's a difference there to begin with, then you should be able to make your selection and adjust it, but if the difference is small then with such minute selections you may have to be conservative in how much you push it. In these scenarios, perhaps it's a good idea to combine the tool with a power window or even look into some of the beauty refinement tools offered by Resolve that are designed to detect different facial features spatially rather than pixel-by-pixel. I'd also look into split-toning, which can go a long way in making skin look less 'flat' by adding color separation between the shadows and highlights of the face. With SmoothShift, you could even isolate such an effect to only the skin hues, for example by selecting the low-luminance skintones and pushing the hue to be either more magenta or more yellow. Or you could just use SmoothShift to select the skintones and then outsource the split-toning effect to another node with SmoothShift's selection matte fed into the alpha input. There are a lot of different possible approaches, and increasing 'complexity' of skin is a task that could be approached in many different ways - perhaps a frequency separation, contrast, or sharpness adjustment could also help you with that goal. But hopefully my response gives you a few ideas!
Cheers Luis! The sat model change shouldn't be too noticeable - the main thing is that the default is now *slightly* more subtractive than before, and the visual change is now perhaps a bit more uniform as you move the slider around. Previously the 0.0 - 0.5 range felt a bit less of a difference than the 0.5 - 1.0 in my experience
How would you use something like this to qualify skin, then manipulate the skin? I use a couple different DCTLs to manipulate skin, but I prefer qualifying skin for pictures. Your DCTL could come in useful there for me. If I use it to qualify skin, would I use a parallel node to throw my other DCTL in conjunction with yours, then manipulate the skin?
@@NONE2NONE Hi! Yep, you can most certainly use it to qualify skin - that's one of the most common uses for it! If you haven't yet, I'd recommend watching the examples in the previous video (link in this video desc). Basically, the default target hue is already the skintones, so just by reducing the hue qualifier width you'll be well on your way to selecting the skin. Then you can either use the built-in adjustment sliders (Hue Shift, Sat Shift, Lum Shift) to manipulate the skin, OR enable the matte output and connect it to another node to make any adjustments you want in another tool with your SmoothShift qualification as an input matte. There's also an explanation for that setup in the previous video! Let me know if that answers your question :)
This looks like an incredible tool. Is it possible to bake adjustments from the DCTL into a LUT? I always steer clear of regular qualifications in look dev workflows, but it'd be amazing to be able to use this as part of a show LUT.
Hey Elliot! You can absolutely bake it into a LUT. None of the operations are spatial so as long as you remember to turn off the selection preview before haha, it'll work!
Hello! That's a good question. In Resolve, ColorSlice is a 6-vector (+ skin) 'Hue vs' tool - essentially what it does is define preset hue ranges, and allows adjustment of the hue, sat, lum of that hue range. In SmoothShift, this is comparable to setting the Target Hue Qualifier to different predefined values, locking the 'width' control to a specific value so the user can't touch it, then using the Hue Shift, Sat Shift, and Lum Shift. The design focus of SmoothShift is to allow you to make highly customized adjustments - so instead of limiting the qualification to predefined ranges of hue, it allows you to select exactly the range of hue, sat, lum that you want. You can select just a small area of the hue (ilke ColorSlice), or you could select all of the high-sat values of ALL hues, or be as specific as 'give me only the high-sat, near-black cyans' if you wanted to. Essentially, you can be as broad or as narrow as you wish in the selection, and instead of just hue as a qualifier you can use all three of hue, sat, lum with high precision (and smooth selection edges automatically maintained). Since you mentioned the skin tab specifically: Yep, at an essential level they likely use a similar approach in isolating the adjustment to the skintones (if you bring down the hue selection width and target the skintones in SmoothShift, that is). But once your goals become a bit more nuanced ("hmm, the dark areas of the skintones are too magenta" or "i'd love to add some saturation to the skin without making the bright areas look like a tomato"), that's where SmoothShift is going to really shine and you might find yourself hitting a wall with Resolve's ColorSlice. I've also had some scenes (in dark/horror or bar/club type lighting, for example) where the skin of an actor doesn't even live in an area that ColorSlice qualifies as skin, but rather straddles between two of the predefined hue ranges for example. That's another situation where a highly custom selection mask can be super helpful to get a clean qualification
This tool looks amazing! I'm really close to pulling the trigger on it. One quick question: have you tried to qualify say pink lips or the reds in skin in order to increase the complexity of the colors in the skin? Cheers!
Hello! That's an interesting question. The ability to qualify specific parts of the skin while avoiding others is dependent on how much variation is already there in the data, so your ability to do this well will likely vary a lot based on the shot. If your subject's lips start as a very similar color to their cheek, for example, then you'll find that you'll have a harder time selecting it and will have to use a smaller qualifier width to isolate one or the other in your selection. The smaller the width you use, the more likely your change will introduce visual tearing, since strong, highly isolated changes are most likely to test the limits of the depth of the data collected by the sensor. But if the lips are already significantly more red than the skin, and you want to push that further, then it would likely be pretty easy!
In general, I'd say it's a balancing act on how much you can push the footage. If there's a difference there to begin with, then you should be able to make your selection and adjust it, but if the difference is small then with such minute selections you may have to be conservative in how much you push it. In these scenarios, perhaps it's a good idea to combine the tool with a power window or even look into some of the beauty refinement tools offered by Resolve that are designed to detect different facial features spatially rather than pixel-by-pixel.
I'd also look into split-toning, which can go a long way in making skin look less 'flat' by adding color separation between the shadows and highlights of the face. With SmoothShift, you could even isolate such an effect to only the skin hues, for example by selecting the low-luminance skintones and pushing the hue to be either more magenta or more yellow. Or you could just use SmoothShift to select the skintones and then outsource the split-toning effect to another node with SmoothShift's selection matte fed into the alpha input.
There are a lot of different possible approaches, and increasing 'complexity' of skin is a task that could be approached in many different ways - perhaps a frequency separation, contrast, or sharpness adjustment could also help you with that goal. But hopefully my response gives you a few ideas!
@ Thank you for the thorough explanation! I’ll test it out. Keep up the great work!
@@DonDon14560 Cheers! Feel free to reach out if you have any more questions!
@@HenryBobeck Oh! One last thing: Is Lum Shift similar to what other DCTL creators call Density?
@@DonDon14560 That's correct!
Nice update❤ henry i wanted to see the dif in the change you did in the sat models 😢
Cheers Luis! The sat model change shouldn't be too noticeable - the main thing is that the default is now *slightly* more subtractive than before, and the visual change is now perhaps a bit more uniform as you move the slider around. Previously the 0.0 - 0.5 range felt a bit less of a difference than the 0.5 - 1.0 in my experience
How would you use something like this to qualify skin, then manipulate the skin? I use a couple different DCTLs to manipulate skin, but I prefer qualifying skin for pictures. Your DCTL could come in useful there for me. If I use it to qualify skin, would I use a parallel node to throw my other DCTL in conjunction with yours, then manipulate the skin?
@@NONE2NONE Hi! Yep, you can most certainly use it to qualify skin - that's one of the most common uses for it! If you haven't yet, I'd recommend watching the examples in the previous video (link in this video desc). Basically, the default target hue is already the skintones, so just by reducing the hue qualifier width you'll be well on your way to selecting the skin. Then you can either use the built-in adjustment sliders (Hue Shift, Sat Shift, Lum Shift) to manipulate the skin, OR enable the matte output and connect it to another node to make any adjustments you want in another tool with your SmoothShift qualification as an input matte. There's also an explanation for that setup in the previous video! Let me know if that answers your question :)
This looks like an incredible tool. Is it possible to bake adjustments from the DCTL into a LUT? I always steer clear of regular qualifications in look dev workflows, but it'd be amazing to be able to use this as part of a show LUT.
Hey Elliot! You can absolutely bake it into a LUT. None of the operations are spatial so as long as you remember to turn off the selection preview before haha, it'll work!
@@HenryBobeck That's fantastic news! Thanks for your reply.
Hey Henry, how does your DCTL differ from the Skin tab in the Color Slicer in DaVinci? Aren't they essentially doing the same thing in isolating?
Hello! That's a good question. In Resolve, ColorSlice is a 6-vector (+ skin) 'Hue vs' tool - essentially what it does is define preset hue ranges, and allows adjustment of the hue, sat, lum of that hue range. In SmoothShift, this is comparable to setting the Target Hue Qualifier to different predefined values, locking the 'width' control to a specific value so the user can't touch it, then using the Hue Shift, Sat Shift, and Lum Shift.
The design focus of SmoothShift is to allow you to make highly customized adjustments - so instead of limiting the qualification to predefined ranges of hue, it allows you to select exactly the range of hue, sat, lum that you want. You can select just a small area of the hue (ilke ColorSlice), or you could select all of the high-sat values of ALL hues, or be as specific as 'give me only the high-sat, near-black cyans' if you wanted to. Essentially, you can be as broad or as narrow as you wish in the selection, and instead of just hue as a qualifier you can use all three of hue, sat, lum with high precision (and smooth selection edges automatically maintained).
Since you mentioned the skin tab specifically: Yep, at an essential level they likely use a similar approach in isolating the adjustment to the skintones (if you bring down the hue selection width and target the skintones in SmoothShift, that is). But once your goals become a bit more nuanced ("hmm, the dark areas of the skintones are too magenta" or "i'd love to add some saturation to the skin without making the bright areas look like a tomato"), that's where SmoothShift is going to really shine and you might find yourself hitting a wall with Resolve's ColorSlice. I've also had some scenes (in dark/horror or bar/club type lighting, for example) where the skin of an actor doesn't even live in an area that ColorSlice qualifies as skin, but rather straddles between two of the predefined hue ranges for example. That's another situation where a highly custom selection mask can be super helpful to get a clean qualification
@ Thank you for your concise reply. I will definitely consider buying your DCTL.
@@syekbe Cheers man, if you have any more questions feel free to ask! I'm here to help :)