For a more in depth look at the DI process for Birdman you can watch a short Variety interview with the great Steve Scott here. An incredible amount of work was done in the grade but again; is he the one creating the look? Nope, he’s refining what’s already there.

Maintaining Natural Skin Tones

As in filmmaking there aren’t rules as such when it comes to grading; keeping your signal legal being about the only one I can think of. Again though there are guidelines and two of the most important ones to help an image stay believable are to keep your blacks neutral and skin tones natural.

Therefore another advantage of creating the base of your looks in camera is that the less you have to manipulate the colours of an image in the grade, the less time you’ll have to spend tinkering with skin tones.

Say you’re after a very warm look but you’ve shot a scene without any warm elements. To create the look you’re having to push a lot of yellow into the mids, which carries over to the skin tones of all the characters in the image. So now you have to qualify the skin and try and strike a balance where skin still feels warm in keeping with the rest of the scene, but not too warm that it looks unnatural.

This then has to be done for every shot, a time and labour intensive process.

There’s a time and a place for qualifying skin tones, and if done well you can create some really interesting and creative effects, like how Juan Melara demonstrates in a couple of excellent grade breakdowns here and here.