How do I isolate two or more colours?

[incubo1]

In the video, everything goes greyscale. Then the protagonist brings back the colours one by one. So what you have is:

• greyscale

• greyscale + blue

• greyscale + blue + orange

• greyscale + blue + orange + yellow

• greyscale + blue + orange + yellow + purple

• greyscale + blue + orange + yellow + purple + red

• + green (=full colour; yes, I will need to bring back pink, brown, etc. too)

Any suggestions as how to achieve this in the best way would be really appreciated. I have tried some techniques in PP and AE, and doing this with one colour is fine, but two or more not so obvious to me.

Bonus question: bringing back yellow also tends to bring back the yellow in skin, which is awful. Would I need to mask this, or can this degree of differentiation be achieved automatically? 

Thank you so much!

[Mylenium]

Show us soem frames and explain what needs to be colored what. Yes, presumably you're going to need a ton of masking if the footage wasn't shot with the later treatment in mind to generate procedural mattes, but that's all we can say at this point. Anything more will require much better info.

Mylenium

[incubo1]

Thanks for your quick reply. Uh oh, that sounds tricky. Here are some frames from various stages of progression.

Orange + blue example:

Blue + orange + yellow (luckily no orange here - this is where I had the problem with the skin tone):

blue + orange + yellow + purple:

blue + orange + yellow + purple + red (all except green):

I guess with the masking the only saving grace is that in most scenes, not all the colours that have been found are actually present. But it's not going to be easy doing it all manually.

[Mylenium]

A few of the shots can be treated easily with relatively rough masks and selective Lumetri corrections, but some will indeed require some precise masking and duplicating layers to treat individual areas separately. Unfortunately the colors are very muted, so there won't be much contrast to cleanly extract info based on channels. If e.g. the purple shirt would me more vibrant it would be simple to generate a matte by combining red and blue. Anyway, your shots are perfectly workable, it's just going to take more effort and time than you may have anticipated.

Mylenium 

[incubo1]

Thank you so much for your expert advice. That sounds okay then, the clips are relatively short at least. Just one follow-up question, if you don't mind: What steps would you take, specifically? I.e. what would you try first, second, third with any given clip, and which programme (PP/AE) would you use for these steps? Thank you so much for helping me out.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

For color correction you group the shots by their predominant colors and which specific colors need to be treated. You would e.g. have a "master" shot where all your colors are present and apply a reference correction, then sift through the shots based on that and apply the same preset/ copy & paste the effect. You then start creating masks on the shots where the basic correction no longer is able to do its own magic. Over time you will see which shots are really difficult and which ones are simple like the ones where the shirt guy only stands in front of walls. those can be tackled easily by just dialling down the neutrals to remove the yellow cast. So basically you work in the reverse order you envision your movie. You subtract more color from shots. For the simple shots you could get away with doing this in Premiere, but for the complex ones you will definitely need AE's masking tools like where the guy's snacking the cookies or the lounge scene.

Mylenium

[incubo1]

Thanks so much!