---
title: "Skin Tone Color Correction and Grading | colorgrade.video"
description: "Skin tone color correction: read faces on the vectorscope skin line and waveform, fix magenta, green or orange skin, and protect skin from a look. Free studio."
url: https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones
---

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3. Skin tones

Chapter 7 of 13 · Intermediate · 8 min read

# How to Grade Skin Tones with the Vectorscope

Viewers forgive a sky that is a little too blue or a wall that is the wrong shade of grey. They do not forgive skin. We look at faces more than at anything else in a frame, and we know from a lifetime of looking what healthy skin is like, so a few degrees of green reads as illness and a little too much orange reads as fake tan. Skin is the colour that tells an audience whether to trust the rest of the grade.

The good news is that skin is also the easiest colour to measure. Almost every complexion lands close to one line on the vectorscope, and faces fall in predictable places on the waveform. This chapter shows how to read both, how to fix the common casts, and how to keep skin believable when you add a strong look on top.

It builds on [reading video scopes](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes) and [secondary colour correction](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/secondary-color-correction); if the vectorscope or a qualifier is new to you, start there.

Video guide

## How to Correct Skin Tones with the Vectorscope Skin Line

Duration:  0:44 

Your browser can't play this video. [Download the MP4](https://colorgrade.video/media/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope/video.mp4) or read the[full transcript](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope).

Chapters

1. [ Play from  0:00 Read skin on the scopes ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope#t=0)
2. [ Play from  0:04 Protect skin from a look ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope#t=4)
3. [ Play from  0:14 Lift the face ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope#t=14)
4. [ Play from  0:42 Try it yourself ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope#t=42)

English captions [Watch page and full transcript ](https://colorgrade.video/videos/how-to-correct-skin-tones-with-the-vectorscope) 

## Key takeaways

* Healthy skin of every complexion sits near the skin tone line on the **Vectorscope**: the hue is similar, the saturation and brightness differ.
* If the whole frame is off, fix skin with white balance on **Correction**; if only skin is off, use a secondary with the **Skin** preset.
* Raise **Protect skin tones** before you push a look, and keep it below 100% so faces still belong to the scene.
* Orange skin usually means too much **Saturation**; grey skin usually means a cool grade has crept into the midtones.

## In this chapter

1. [ 1. Why skin matters most ](#why-skin-matters)
2. [ 2. The skin tone line on the vectorscope ](#skin-tone-line)
3. [ 3. Reading skin on the waveform ](#skin-on-the-waveform)
4. [ 4. Fixing magenta, green and yellow skin ](#fixing-skin-casts)
5. [ 5. Protecting skin from a look ](#protect-skin)
6. [ 6. A soft window to lift a face ](#lift-a-face)
7. [ 7. Common skin mistakes ](#common-mistakes)
8. [ 8. Try it: check and protect skin tones ](#try-it)

## Why skin matters most

Psychologists call skin a memory colour: a colour we judge against an internal reference rather than against what is next to it. Grass, sky and skin are the big three, and skin is by far the strictest. You can grade the background teal, the sky orange or the whole frame black and white and the audience follows along, but the moment faces drift towards green or magenta, the picture looks broken.

That is why experienced colourists check skin first and last. Get it right in the [primary correction](https://colorgrade.video/color-correct-video), protect it while building the look, then check it again before export, because almost every creative move pushes on it.

## The skin tone line on the vectorscope

The **Vectorscope** plots every pixel by its colour alone: the angle round the circle is the hue, and the distance from the centre is the saturation. Brightness is ignored. A neutral grey sits in the middle, and the six small boxes mark where 75% colour bars land, so you can see red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta round the edge.

The skin tone line runs from the centre out between the red and yellow targets, at about 123° from the horizontal axis, or roughly the 11 o’clock position. Engineers will know it as the I-line of analogue NTSC, an axis originally chosen because it matched the orange-cyan direction in which human vision is most sensitive to detail. It has outlived NTSC because faces of every ethnicity cluster along it.

### Why every complexion sits near the same line

The colour of skin comes mostly from two pigments: haemoglobin in the blood, which is red, and melanin, which is a brown that sits between red and yellow. Different complexions contain different amounts of melanin, which makes skin deeper and changes how saturated it is, but it does not swing the hue far. So light, medium and deep skin all point in roughly the same direction on the vectorscope. They differ in how far from the centre they reach and, on the waveform, in how high they sit.

[ ![Vectorscope in the colorgrade.video studio showing a portrait: the cluster of skin pixels extends from the centre along the skin tone line between the red and yellow targets, at about 11 o’clock.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/vectorscope-skin-line.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/vectorscope-skin-line.webp) 

The face forms a cluster along the skin tone line, between the red and yellow targets.

Treat the line as a reference, not a law. A spread of a few degrees either side is normal; make-up, warm sunset light or a deliberate stylised grade can move faces off it on purpose. What matters is that you notice when skin has moved and decide whether you meant it. Because the vectorscope shows the whole frame, a red jumper or a beige wall can hide the face; isolate it with a soft window on a secondary layer, or check the **Highlight** view to see what you are looking at.

## Reading skin on the waveform

The **Waveform** shows brightness from 0 to 100% for each column of the picture, so a face shows up as a bright cluster at its horizontal position. There is no single correct level, but as a rough guide for a normally lit shot, the lit side of fair skin often sits around 60-70%, medium skin around 45-60% and deep skin around 30-50%. The **False colour** view marks 60-66% in pink as a guide to bright skin.

* Don’t force every face to the same level. Lifting deep skin to where fair skin sits flattens it and greys it out; it should be rich, not pale.
* Look at the spread inside the face as well as its average. The gap between the lit side and the shadow side is the lighting ratio, and squashing it removes the shape of the face.
* Switch to **Parade** to see the channels. In natural skin, red is highest, then green, then blue. If green climbs level with red, the skin will look sickly; if blue climbs towards green, it will look grey and cold.

[ ![Studio showing a daylight portrait beside a Parade scope: in the columns covering the face, the red trace sits highest, green a little lower and blue lowest.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/waveform-skin.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/waveform-skin.webp) 

In the **Parade**, natural skin reads red highest, then green, then blue.

## Fixing magenta, green and yellow skin

First decide whether the cast belongs to the whole frame or only to the skin. If whites and greys are off too, the light or the camera’s white balance is wrong, and the fix belongs on **Correction**: **Pick white** on something neutral, then trim **Temperature** and **Tint** while you watch the skin on the scope (see [white balance](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance)). If greys are neutral but skin is still off, the problem is the skin itself, usually because of mixed light, make-up or a light source with an uneven spectrum.

__Common skin casts and their fixes__
| Skin looks        | On the vectorscope               | Whole-frame fix          | Skin-only fix                         |
| ----------------- | -------------------------------- | ------------------------ | ------------------------------------- |
| Magenta, flushed  | Rotated towards red and magenta  | **Tint** towards green   | **Skin** key, small **Hue rotate**    |
| Green, sickly     | Rotated towards yellow and green | **Tint** towards magenta | **Skin** key, small **Hue rotate**    |
| Yellow, jaundiced | Rotated towards yellow           | **Temperature** cooler   | **Hue vs Hue** towards red            |
| Orange, fake tan  | On the line, too far out         | Less **Saturation**      | **Skin** key, lower **Saturation**    |
| Grey, ashen       | Too close to the centre          | Less cool in the grade   | **Skin** key, a little **Saturation** |

For a skin-only fix, add a secondary layer, turn on **Use qualifier** and choose the **Skin** preset. Check the selection with **Show mask** set to **Highlight**, then use **Hue rotate** a few degrees at a time in whichever direction brings the trace back to the line. Small moves are enough: five degrees is a big change in skin. A **Hue vs Hue** curve with **Pick colour** on the face does a similar job without a mask, but it also moves every other object of the same hue.

## Protecting skin from a look

Most creative looks push the warm and cool ends of the picture apart. Skin sits on the warm side, so a look that warms highlights pushes faces further out along the line, and one that cools the midtones drags them towards grey. **Protect skin tones** in the **Looks** panel solves this with a built-in skin qualifier: pixels that match skin are held back from the look by the amount you set.

* Start around 50-80%. At 100% faces can look pasted in, untouched by a light that has changed everything around them.
* It keys by colour, so orange objects near skin hue, such as wood, sand or a brick wall, are protected too. Usually that is harmless; if not, lower it and use a secondary instead.
* Skin under strong coloured light, such as a red stage wash, may fall outside the key. Check the vectorscope rather than assuming it worked.

To build the same thing by hand, add a secondary layer, choose the **Skin** preset and switch on **Invert mask**. The layer now grades everything except skin, which is a neat way to cool a background without touching the faces in front of it. It is a common way to build [teal and orange](https://colorgrade.video/teal-and-orange) in a professional grade.

[ ![Split compare of a daylight portrait with a teal and orange look: on the left the look at full strength turns the face orange; on the right, with Protect skin tones at 70%, the face stays natural while the background stays teal.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/protect-skin-tones.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/protect-skin-tones.webp) 

A strong look with **Protect skin tones** at 70%: the background takes the look, the face stays near the skin line.

## A soft window to lift a face

On set, a reflector or a bounce card adds a little light to the face so it stands out from the background. A window does the same in the grade. Add a secondary layer, add a **Circle**, make it larger than the face and raise **Feather** until you can’t see where it ends. Then raise **Exposure** by a quarter to half a stop, or open up the face’s shadow side with **Lift** in **Wheels** while this layer is selected.

Keep it subtle. The audience should feel that the face is better lit, not see a halo following it. If the background close to the face is lifted too, combine the window with the **Skin** qualifier: windows and the qualifier intersect, so only skin inside the circle changes. The window won’t track a moving head, so keep it generous and check the whole clip.

[ ![Daylight portrait in Highlight view with a large, feathered Circle window and the Skin qualifier: only the face and neck appear in colour, the background is grey.](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/face-window-highlight.webp)  (enlarge image) ](https://colorgrade.video/guides/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones/face-window-highlight.webp) 

A soft **Circle** intersected with the **Skin** preset selects just the face, ready to lift.

Try it in the studio

Open a clip with a face, add a secondary layer with a feathered **Circle** on the face and **Exposure** at about 0.3, then toggle the layer on and off in **Layers** while watching the **Waveform**. The face cluster moves up a few percent; the rest of the trace stays put.

## Common skin mistakes

1. **Orange skin from saturation.** Skin is already one of the most saturated things in an everyday frame, so global **Saturation** pushes it out first. Use **Vibrance**, which holds back colours that are already saturated, or see [video saturation](https://colorgrade.video/video-saturation).
2. **Grey skin from a cool grade.** A teal push that reaches into the midtones drains the warmth from faces. Keep the cool in the shadows and raise **Protect skin tones**.
3. **Judging on one screen.** Phones and laptops differ wildly in colour and many shift warmer at night. The skin tone line is the same on every screen; trust it over your eyes when they disagree.
4. **One setting for every face.** In a two-shot of different complexions, match their hue, not their brightness or saturation.
5. **Fixing skin before the primary.** A skin secondary on an unbalanced frame chases a moving target. Balance first, then refine.

## Try it: check and protect skin tones

Read a face on the vectorscope, keep it out of a strong look with Protect skin tones, and lift it with a soft window on its own layer.

1. 1  
### Open the scopes
Switch to **Pro** and choose **Vectorscope** and **Waveform**. Find the face cluster and see how close it lies to the skin tone line.
2. 2  
### Apply a strong look
In **Looks**, choose a teal and orange look such as **Blockbuster** at full **Intensity**, and watch the skin cluster move off the line.
3. 3  
### Protect the skin
Raise **Protect skin tones** to about 70% until the cluster swings back towards the line while the background keeps the look.
4. 4  
### Lift the face
Open **Secondary**, choose **Add a secondary layer**, add a large **Circle** over the face, raise **Feather**, then raise **Exposure** about a third of a stop.
5. 5  
### Compare
Use **Compare**, **Split** and play the clip to check the face stays inside the window and still looks natural.

## Skin tones: questions

### What is the skin tone line on a vectorscope?

It is a line from the centre of the vectorscope at about 123°, between the red and yellow targets, roughly at 11 o’clock. Natural skin of almost every complexion clusters along it, so it is a quick check that faces have a believable hue.

### Does the skin tone line work for every skin colour?

Yes, within a few degrees. Light and deep skin share a similar hue because the same pigments colour them; what changes is saturation (distance from the centre) and brightness, which the waveform shows rather than the vectorscope.

### Why does skin look orange after colour grading?

Usually because saturation or warmth was raised for the whole frame and skin, already the warmest and most saturated thing in the shot, went furthest. Use **Vibrance** instead of **Saturation**, lower the warmth, or protect skin from the look.

### How do I fix green or magenta skin tones?

If greys are off as well, correct the whole frame with **Tint** on the green-magenta axis. If only skin is off, key it with the **Skin** qualifier on a secondary layer and use a few degrees of **Hue rotate** to bring it back to the skin tone line.

### Where should skin tones sit on the waveform?

There is no fixed number. As a rough guide for normally lit faces, fair skin often sits around 60-70%, medium skin around 45-60% and deep skin around 30-50%. Keep the light and shadow sides apart so the face keeps its shape.

### How do I keep skin natural with a teal and orange look?

Keep the teal mostly in the shadows, keep the orange gentle, and raise **Protect skin tones** to around 50-80% so faces stay near the skin tone line while the background takes the look.

[ ← Previous: chapter 6 Secondary correction ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/secondary-color-correction) [ Next: chapter 8 → Log footage and LUTs ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/log-footage-and-luts) 

## Keep going

* [ Secondary correction Isolate one colour or one area of the frame with a qualifier or a power window, check the matte, and grade that part alone. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/secondary-color-correction)
* [ White balance Why casts happen, how Temperature and Tint work, how to neutralise a shot on the parade, and how to add warmth on purpose. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance)
* [ Teal and orange color grading Why the blockbuster palette works and how to stop it turning faces orange. ](https://colorgrade.video/teal-and-orange)
* [ Creative looks Build a look on top of a correction: complementary colour, film-style contrast and texture, split toning, black and white, and the restraint that holds it together. ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/creative-looks)

All 13 chapters 
1. [ 1\. Video scopes ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/video-scopes)  · Basics
2. [ 2\. Contrast and tonal range ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/contrast-and-tonal-range)  · Basics
3. [ 3\. White balance ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/white-balance)  · Basics
4. [ 4\. Colour wheels ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/color-wheels)  · Intermediate
5. [ 5\. Curves ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/curves)  · Intermediate
6. [ 6\. Secondary correction ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/secondary-color-correction)  · Intermediate
7. [ 7\. Skin tones ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/skin-tones)  · Intermediate
8. [ 8\. Log footage and LUTs ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/log-footage-and-luts)  · Advanced
9. [ 9\. Creative looks ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/creative-looks)  · Advanced
10. [ 10\. Shot matching ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/shot-matching)  · Advanced
11. [ 11\. Delivery and export ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/delivery)  · Advanced
12. [ 12\. Grading workflow ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/workflow)  · Intermediate
13. [ 13\. Common mistakes ](https://colorgrade.video/color-grading-tutorial/mistakes)  · Basics