Skintone Scope
Overview
The SkinTone Scope is a specialized tool for monitoring skin tones. It creates a color qualifier targeting only the skin tone range, offering precision in color grading.
Color Models
The SkinTone Scope features two color models:
HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) — Ideal for intuitive adjustments because it separates color (hue) from the non-color brightness channel (value).
Y'CbCr (Luma, Blue-Difference Chroma, Red-Difference Chroma) — Suited for broadcast workflows, working directly on the signal's luma (Y') and color-difference (Cb, Cr) components. Note that Y' is luma, not scene luminance — it's computed from the non-linear R'G'B' signal.
Hue detection range
In the hue-based model, the Hue Detection slider is a normalized control over a limited skin-tone hue window, not the full 0–360° hue wheel. The 0.0 to 1.0 slider range maps to a 144° span around the red/skin-tone region:
This means:
The default Hue Detection bounds of 0.42 to 0.70 represent approximately 348.5° to 28.8°, wrapping through 0°.
Auto Find Range (1.11.50+)
Auto Find Range detects a face in the current frame and configures the SkinTone detection range automatically from that face's skin pixels — no manual slider tweaking required. One click sets both the HSV and Y'CbCr windows (hue, saturation/chroma, and luma) from what it measured.
You can trigger it three ways:
From the scope settings panel (the Auto Find Range button).
From the scope context menu (right-click the scope).
From a custom keyboard or Stream Deck action (
SkinToneAutoFindRange).
When it runs, a fading cyan outline (the detected face rectangle plus the sampled ellipse) confirms what was detected. The outline tracks zoom and pan so you can verify the pick.
If several people are in frame, Auto Find Range picks the largest face. Candidates are tried largest-first and each must yield a valid skin-tone window, so detector false positives (e.g. foliage) are rejected in favor of a real face.
Face detection uses Apple Vision on macOS and a bundled detector on Windows, and runs on a worker thread so it never stalls the render loop.
Wide Hue Range (1.11.50+)
Heavily graded or stylized footage (for example a cold teal grade or neon lighting) can push skin chroma far outside the standard skin-tone hue band, leaving a face unselectable at any slider setting. Wide hue range maps the sliders across the full color wheel in both color models so those tones can be qualified.
Toggling it remaps the current sliders so your selected window stays in place. Auto Find Range enables Wide hue range automatically when the detected face's tones fall outside the standard windows — so on stylized shots a single click both finds the face and widens the range for you.
Features
Luma and Saturation Range — Narrow the range for finer control over skin tones.
Skin Hue Guide (1.11.50+) — The default overlay. Selected pixels are colored yellow when they sit within tolerance of the target skin-tone hue, magenta below it, and green above — a quick visual for how well skin aligns to the target. This is the overlay shown in the Auto Find Range examples above.
Overlay Modes — Additional visualization options: grid, solid color, or a custom gradient between two selected colors.
Global Mask — Apply the skin tone selection as a global mask so all scopes display only the skin tone areas from the active image.
Low-Pass Filter — Smooth out the selection for a more natural look.
Achromatic pixels such as pure grays, black, or white are excluded from SkinTone detection, so neutral highlights and shadows are not treated as skin.
Presets (1.11.52+)
Save the current Skin Tone setup — detection range, filtering, overlay, and mask settings — as a named preset and recall it in any session. This is handy for switching between talent, lighting setups, or show-specific looks without re-tuning the sliders.
Presets are available from the Presets menu in the scope context menu, and from the Presets section of the scope settings window:
Save Current As... — store the current settings under a name.
Click a preset name to load it.
Delete Preset — remove a saved preset.
Reload Presets — rescan the preset folder, e.g. after copying preset files from another machine.
Saved presets are included in configuration exports, so they travel with your setup when you move to another workstation.
3-Color Mode with Sharp Transitions (1.10.139+)
Adds a three-color overlay mode with sharp transitions for quick pass/fail matching of skin tones.
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