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Changing the color of clothing in a scene (frame by frame?)
Hello,
I have been asked to change the color of a characters clothing in a video. I was hoping I would be able to use an alpha matte, motion tracking, or some other method other than painstakingly animating a mask frame by frame. After some research and attempts at other methods, I resigned myself to having to do a frame by frame correction. But not only is it taking an incredible amount of time, it is also creating that infamous edge buzz that you get from the fact that drawing masks by hand is pretty imprecise. The biggest issue is that the scene is not well lit, and the color of the character’s clothing is extremely close to an object in the background. I am no expert in after effects, clearly, but I am having a hard time finding a solution.
I am posting a photo of before and after. I can get it to look great in a still frame, but with the movement it doesn’t look right.
Before:
After:
I really appreciate anyone’s advice or suggestions.
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5 Replies
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My advice? Charge them hourly, and tell them how many hours it’s going to take you to get this right.
If they aren’t paying you, or if it’s a per-project fee, tell them to either live with the colors they shot on set and presumably had plenty of time to choose in planning and preproduction, or reshoot it.
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Haha, thank you. It is paid per-clip. I guess this is a case of the famous “we’ll fix it in post” scenario, huh?.
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Seriously, though, you need to renegotiate if they are dead set on this. If you gave them a scope-of-work document at the beginning, that is a valid reference. If they’re going outside the scope of what you, and they, outlined in that brief, then you are completely within your contractual rights to let them know that this request is going to cost them more money.
If you’re pulling a chroma key from this (and Dave’s right, their DP should be put out of their misery for this setup), it might be wise to do that first before attempting the color changes they want. Have you tried the rotobrush tool?
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Wow, that’s rough. You could try to use some form of secondary color correction (in either Premiere, After Effects or Speedgrade), but the door and skin tones unfortunately are very similar in color to the clothing color, so it may be in vain. You could also look into the rotobrush.
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Thank you all! Using the rotobrush, (and asking for more money!) worked! I really appreciate the help 🙂
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