A Gentle Introduction to Creative Colorization

A Gentle Introduction to Creative Colorization
Simple ideas for creatively colorizing stock footage.
by Chris & Trish Meyer
Color is one of the most important concepts in motion graphics. Often, your client has corporate or
otherwise favorite colors that they would like you to reinforce. Choice of color can also evoke a certain mood, such as red’s association with heat and blue with cool. Or maybe you’re trying to find a
way to unify the look of a disparate assortment of clips you’ve edited together.
In this article we will outline some approaches to colorize your footage to achieve these aims, focusing on easier-to-use creative tools. We’ll start with some meat and potatoes effects for altering contrast and color, then moving on to some more creative ways to tint your images.
When it comes to heavy duty color correction, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Autodesk
combustion all have professional 3-way color correctors built in; Adobe After Effects comes bundled
with the excellent Color Finesse plug-in from Synthetic Aperture <http://www.synthetic-ap.com/products/cf/index.html>. We will not cover such large hammers here. If you want to learn about more
advanced color correction, there are several good books available, such as Steve Hullfish and Jaime
Fowler’s Color Correction for Digital Video <http://www.cmpbooks.com/product/1220>.)
Contrast and Shadowplay
If we had to name our most-used effect, it would probably be Levels. Although you would not think
of Levels as being a color tool, at a minimum it is useful to apply Levels before or after other color
corrections to make sure you are maximizing the contrast in your image. Darkening an image by
decreasing the overall gamma value (which corresponds to dragging the midpoint arrow under the
histogram to the right) can also increase its apparent saturation. Altering the gamma of an individual
color channel changes the color cast of an image.
Figure 1a
Figure 1c
Figure 1b
Vintage footage can have less than optimal with contrast (a). By
using a “levels” effect to match the black and white points to that
present in the footage, and altering the gamma to move the midpoint value (b), you can easily raise the production value of a clip
(c). Clip from Artbeats Retro Americana.
If you have been using Brightness/Contrast to edit the gray values of an image, you should definitely
spend some time trying Levels instead; it is the more refined tool for this job. An even more refined
tool is Curves, which in essence gives a much more flexible “gamma” control for the overall image,
or each color channel individually. If we want to alter the contrast of, say, just the shadows, we usually start by adding some points along the default Curves line in the midrange through highlights, just
to “nail down” the curve so we don’t move those values accidentally. We then add and tweak a curve
point in the shadow area, to either lift detail out of the shadows or make them richer.
Again, altering individual color channels allows you to add tints, such as adding a blue cast to the
shadows by “lifting” the curve – and therefore, resulting color values – just in this range. The alternative to raising the bridge is to lower the river: If emphasizing one color channel is making the shadows too bright, consider instead lowering the curve for the other two color channels in this region.
Figure 2c
Figure 2a
Figure 2b
A “curves” effect allows more precise control over the
gray values in a clip. Here we took a reddish clip from
the Artbeats Canyon Textures collection (a) and edited
the lower end of the Blue Channel curve (b) to introduce
more blue in the shadows (c). Note that we’ve added additional points along the default diagonal line in a curves
effect to ensure we don’t accidentally edit regions we
want to alter, such as the midtones or highlights
TThese trade-offs can be a bit tricky to master with Curves. Therefore, we suggest you consider using
a Color Balance effect, which allows you to boost or suppress each color channel specifically in the
shadows, midtones, and highlights. Indeed, you should make this underused effect part of your regular toolbox. Don’t be intimidated by its large number of controls; read the parameters, and what it’s
going to do becomes quite obvious.
Broad Color Changes
Our second most-used effect is probably Hue/Saturation. Rotating the hue parameter is often all you
need to alter background stock footage to the color you need. We also often nudge the Saturation a
bit higher to increase the intensity of stock footage, or decrease it make it “sit back” in a composite
or seem more like older footage. However, you need to be careful with both of these controls. In-
creasing Saturation too much often results in posterization of an image (where areas take on flat colors, rather than having smooth gradations). And some images simply don’t take well to having their
Hue rotated, with the result occasionally being garish clashes of adjacent colors.
The Hue/Saturation filter in Adobe After Effects
has an oft-overlooked Channel Control popup, that
allows you to choose a specific range of colors to
tweak such as just the blues or just the yellows.
Select an option from the popup, and the Channel
Range control underneath allows you to tweak what
range of colors are going to be affected (the slender rectangular icons), and how broad the feather
is as you return to the normal color on either side
(the triangular icons). Tweaking Hue or Saturation
will now alter just colors inside that range – such
as making a pale blue/turquoise sky appear to be a
richer sunset violet.
Figure 3a
Quick Tip
Know that compression artifacts often
become more noticeable as you rotate
Hue. Many compression algorithms heavily compress colors they know we are less
sensitive to, such as blue; rotate those
smashed blues into a more noticeable
color like red, and this heavy, previouslyhidden compression is now revealed.
Figure 3b
Figure 3c
To change just a certain range of colors in a shot
– such as a blue sky (a) – set the Channel Range
section of the Hue/Saturation effect in After Effects (b) to the color you want, tweak the affected range as desired, and then adjust the colors in
that range. In this clip from Artbeats Canyon Textures, we darkened the sky and gave it a richer,
pinkish cast (c).
Tint and Tone
Rather than broadly altering contrast and color, consider adding an overall color tint to set
the mood. Many movies have a color tint to them – for example, the green tint of The Matrix.
Ironically, the worst effect to use for this is the After Effects Tint filter. Tint replaces black
with one color and white with another. Any new color you pick is going to be either brighter
than black or darker than white. The result is a loss in contrast in the processed image,
meaning the results look washed out.
A far better effect to apply is something like Cycore FX CC Toner (Cycore FX comes bundled
with After Effects 6, but must be installed separately after the program). CC Toner keeps the
black and white points at black and white, and then tints all of the midtone colors. This maintains full contrast while colorizing your footage. The color you choose replaces the 50% gray
value, so if you pick a new color that is darker than 50% gray, the resulting image is darker
– keep that in mind!
Figure 4a
Tint effects which replace only the white and/or black
values in the original clip (a) with a new color usually
reduce the contrast in an image (b). It is better to use
an effect such as Cycore CC Toner or Boris BCC Tritone,
which can keep the black and white points intact while
replacing midrange colors (c). This tints an image while
maintaining full contrast. Clip from Artbeats Childhood
Scenarios.
Figure 4b
Figure 4c
A more sophisticated toner effect is Boris Continuum Complete’s BCC Tritone, which also allows you to alter what gray level the new color replaces, in essence acting like a gamma control. Thanks to the folks at Boris FX, BCC Tritone comes bundled free with our books Creating
Motion Graphics Volume 1 and After Effects in Production; Continuum Complete comes with
the even more powerful BCC Multitone Mix which allows you to choose multiple intermediate
colors.
The obvious trick to perform with these “tone” filters is to crank them up to 100% and create sepiastyle colorized images. However, they are also useful when backed off to far more subtle amounts. If
you have a series of shots that have color “looks” that don’t match, you can apply the same subtle
tone to all of the clips to pull them into the same look. The easy way to do this in After Effects is to
build your edit, create an Adjustment Layer that sits above your edited sequence, and then apply the
toner filter to this Adjustment Layer, which by design apply the effect to all layers underneath them.
An alternative approach is to place a colored full-frame solid above your edited sequence, and apply
this solid with the Color Blending Mode. Adjust the opacity of this solid to control the amount of tint.
Faux Lighting
If you have experience lighting and shooting your own video, you may have occasionally wished you
were on the set when the stock footage was shot, applying lighting gels and lens filters to get the
color tints you want. There are a couple of ways to do this after the fact.
One of our favorite third-party plug-in sets is 55mm from Digital Film Tools <http://www.digitalfilmtools.com/55mm/>. This extensive package includes a large number of easy-to-use color correction
and image enhancement filters. We get a lot of mileage out of their four Rosco Gels filters, which recreate the colored gels available in Rosco’s Calacolor, Cinegel, Cinelux, and Storaro Selection lines.
In addition to picking a gel color and setting its Opacity (amount of tint), these effects also have a
Preserve Highlights parameter, which lets you decide how much to tint or maintain the hot white
values in the original footage. You can also set up the colorization to be a gradient across the image
(such as from horizon through the sky), rather than the entire image. The results range from subtle
to deep and rich. In addition to recreating a real world tool, we used these extensively to colorize
abstract footage. 55mm is available for After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid, and Autodesk Discreet systems.
If you are an After Effects user, don’t forget that it offers the ability to add lights to a scene. To do
this, you need to enable the 3D Layer switch for a layer, and add a Light to your composition. You
may think “but I’m not creating a 3D scene – I want this to be a normal, 2D, full-frame shot.” That’s
okay: When you enable the 3D Layer switch, it defaults to parameters that keep the same scale and
position as if the layer was still in 2D, so you will not need to reposition it to keep it centered and fullframe. The difference is you can now light it.
Figure 5a
Figure 5b
Figure 5c
To add a color cast to a shot – as well as a vignette-style
falloff in brightness towards the edges (see ‘a’ for before
and ‘b’ for after) – place it in 3D space and add a light to
your scene (c). Clip from Artbeats American West.
Add a light, and set its type to Point. Then pick a color for the light – something with a slight orange
tint to warm up the footage, or with a subtle blue tint to cool off a scene. Center the light’s X and Y
position in the frame, and then play around with the light’s Z position, which controls how far away
it is from the layer. The closer it is, the stronger the vignetting (falloff to darkness) in the corners of
the footage; the further away, the more evenly it will be lit. You can control the Intensity of a light to
affect how brightly lit the footage is. You can crank up the Intensity to values over 100% to get interesting blown-out looks.
Zooming Out
Careful attention to and manipulation of color is how you can raise your production from looking like
just a bunch of clips thrown together, to something that has a cohesive look, mood, and plan. Hopefully this has given you a few ideas of how to colorize your stock footage to create a desired look,
without worry about studying to become a full-blown colorist.
###
Chris and Trish Meyer are the founders and owners of CyberMotion (www.cybmotion.com), an awardwinning motion graphics studio in Los Angeles that has created a wide variety of work for film, broadcast, corporate events, and special venues. They were one of the original development sites for After
Effects, wrote the highly-acclaimed books Creating Motion Graphics and After Effects in Production,
and are long-time Artbeats users.