Tutorial #12 Using Color Corrector Secondary

BillyBoy wrote on 4/9/2003, 2:46 PM

Next tutorial in a series. This one gives detailed how-to on how to change colors in an image by applying the Color Corrector Secondary filter alone or in multiple series. Comments, suggestions, ideas for next tutorial as always, welcome. <wink>

http://www.wideopenwest.com/%7Ewvg/tutorial-menu.htm

Comments

craftech wrote on 4/9/2003, 3:29 PM

Thanks Bill,
Much appreciated as always.

John

dcrandall wrote on 4/9/2003, 7:14 PM

Billyboy,

Great tutorial (as always).

Much appreciated

noFony wrote on 4/9/2003, 7:29 PM

That's too techie for me.

wcoxe1 wrote on 4/9/2003, 8:51 PM

Looks so elementary, once it is properly explained. Thanks, BillyBoy.

Paul_Holmes wrote on 4/9/2003, 9:07 PM

Well, read it over twice, Spitt, and you'll get it! :)
I already used this once in my brother's Paris video to create tie-dye pants. Pretty fun.

BillyBoy wrote on 4/9/2003, 9:16 PM

Holy Cow... I just got a memory flash, anybody remember bell bottoms?

Clyde200 wrote on 4/9/2003, 9:22 PM

1967 - Michigan - Bell Bottoms - Pea Coats.

noFony wrote on 4/9/2003, 9:28 PM

anybody remember bell bottoms?

You mean like what ALL the teenage girls have been wearing for the last 2 or 3 years now? You need to get off yer puter & have a look out the window now and then! ;)

PDB wrote on 4/10/2003, 5:06 AM

BillyBoy,

Thanks for that! a quick question though....how do you use the 2nd colour corrector to Maintain a single colour (and possibly make the rest b&W) - has been asked several times before....

Thanks again!

Paul

BillyBoy wrote on 4/10/2003, 9:27 AM

Using the cookie cutter. BUT... that limits the mask to just a handful of shapes like circle. square, oval. So to continue with the tutorial you could add a new track, copy the image to it, add the cookie cutter then size the mask. The problem of course is it won't be very accuraces since the hat isn't a regular shape so some parts would bleed through.

If the object you want to color is static... meaning it never changes shape or size, then you may be able to mask it by taking a snapshot of it and building a mask in photoshop with does allow you to make masks of any shape. For example you could get fair result with a person if you mask him in Photoshop, but if there are zoom or he moves a hand or stuff like that you'd need a new mask for each new action, then piecing them together to make it look seamless would be one big pain in the butt.

Soon, Borris Red will be have a Vegas plug-in. With it you get the ability to do vector masks and so muxh more. That's my term, didn't bother to see what they call them. Anyhow, you'll be able to use a tool similar to Photoshop's and carefully outline any object and treat it as you wish. For now, AFAIK that isn't possible in Vegas. For an idea, visit their site, they had a quickie demo outlining a sail boat if I remember right.

Baylo wrote on 4/10/2003, 10:27 AM

If you only have the color showing once (presumably on the object you wish to highlight) then this can be done reasonably quickly by setting the mask color to be 180 degrees away from the color you wish to preserve, and then increasing the width parameter. Mentally, I visualize this process as being that I am setting an arc of the color circle to be the masked area, with the initial hue being at the midpoint of that arc. Since that 'midpoint' is opposite the color I want to preserve, I can increase the width almost all the way - the color I want preserved would be the last to be selected.

Then, with everything selected except the bit I want preserved, you can go ahead and use the controls in top half of the plugin to remove all the color.

This takes a bit of fiddling around, and is really only a 'quick and dirty' method, but it can give half-decent results under the right conditions.

I hope this makes some sort of sense... :-)

Mark

Baylo wrote on 4/10/2003, 10:38 AM

As a quick example, using BillyBoy's tutorial:

Let's say we want to preserve the yellow in the hat and make everything else black and white.

We can see from his color wheel illustration that the masked area has a hue at 162.3 and a width of 24.9. These parameters are at bottom right of the plugin window. This defines the yellow area (I'm ignoring the saturation and luminance info for simplicity).

If you change the mask area to a hue of 162.3 + 180 = 342.3, you will select the complementary color. Now, if you increase the width parameter you will start to select all the other colors on the screen, with the yellow color at 162.3 being the last to be selected. You will need to play around with the saturation and luminance sliders to catch everything but be aware that, depending on the source picture, you will likely need to make compromises somewhere (this is why the masking process is technically better, but I would guess more time consuming).

Now, with everything masked except the yellow stripe, you can bring the saturation slider in the top of the plugin down to zero. Bingo! Black and white and yellow (we hope).

Mark

BillyBoy wrote on 4/10/2003, 12:50 PM

Nice tip... I did try the offset myself and didn't like the outcome, so I didn't include it in the tutorial, but maybe I should have tried harder... Maybe I'll give it another shot later. Thanks Baylo.

PDB wrote on 4/10/2003, 12:54 PM

Hey Billyboy and Baylo!
Thanks for those tips! I am going to try them out tonight...It just makes me wonder why there isn't some sort of preset in the secondary colour correction where you could actually hold the colour of choice and make the rest an "alpha channel" or vice-versa... then you could use 2 tracks to create the effect without the need for the cookie cutter. I guess the invert filter/fx has no use for this, right?

I must go and try the Boris stuff: the only problem is if I play with it and like it I will have to sell my minidv cam to be able to buy it! ;) catch 22...

Thanks again for the tips!

Paul.

Baylo wrote on 4/10/2003, 2:11 PM

I should probably say that I have not had the chance yet to try this specifically with Billy Boy's images. I'll have to do that later when I'm in front of the right computer. My numbers in the above are somewhat 'theoretical' at this point.

However I did apply exactly this process to a part of my safari video. By coincidence one day everyone in our group was wearing blue shirts. Of course the background scenery was largely green and brown (as long as the sky was not in the shot). I was very easily able to produce a 10 second clip in black and white with the blue shirts being the only color showing. For added effect I added an undersample so that those 10 seconds ran at 20 frames a second (but without a slowdown in motion). Quite a neat effect that went really well with the accompanying music. I might get around to posting it sometime.

Mark