Change the color of a persons shirt

[Dave Johnson]

Duplicate the footage layer, draw a feathered garbage matte on the top layer loosely masking out everything except the shirt, apply to the top layer whatever combination of color correction filters suits the footage (Change Color, Change To Color, etc.), keyframe as needed.

[Brett Triantafillou]

Ouch! so your saying I have to rotoscope it?

Brett Triantafillou
Check us out at http://www.cinema-alliance.com

Thanks and Enjoy the day!

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

No- he’s suggesting you make a garbage matte around it so that when you use a plug-in that can select a color and changes it, that will not affect the rest of the frame.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Phil Lebeau]

What is the difference between rotoscope and garbage matte? Thanks

[Dave Johnson]

I didn’t use the term rotoscope because that’s not what I meant …

As others mentioned, what I was getting at by suggesting “loosely masking out everything except the shirt” with a “feathered garbage matte” was a way to change the shirt color without noticeably changing the whole shot, but also without doing a fine-point roto. Since we all have some red hues in our skin, if you use cc filters on an entire shot to change a red shirt to blue, there’ll be very noticeable change in the model’s skin tone, along with everything else in the shot. With a feathered garbage matte, the matte protects 90% of the shot from any color change and the feathering blends the other 10% with the original shot making the slight changes around the edges of the matte unnoticeable in many cases (ie, the edges where the model’s arms meet the shirt, etc.).

This method isn’t suitable for any shot in any circumstance, but I based my suggestion partially on the assumption that, if you were doing a Calvin Klein spot for CBS prime time, you would’ve either shot the model wearing different color shirts, with a chroma-key shirt, planned to roto, or planned some other method.

I hope this helps.

[Todd Kopriva]

Dave, Tudor, and Dave are certainly putting you on the right track, but to address one question:

You asked what the difference is between garbage matting and rotoscoping. Technically, none. A careful garbage matte that you’re animating at all is getting pretty close to what one would call rough rotoscoping. The point is that you’re masking/matting out the areas that you don’t want to affect.

If you’ve got a pink shirt on a person with any pink in their skin (i.e., the entirety of humanity), you may end up having to get pretty tight with that mask to prevent affecting the color of the skin.

BTW, Roto Brush is great for this kind of thing. I’ve found that it’s the best solution for making really tight garbage mattes for selective color changes. The first video tutorial linked to from this page shows how to do exactly that.

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[Danny Hays]

I would try keying out the pink, set tight to that specific shade as to not keyout skin, but without making the pink totally transparent so you still see the sweater texture, then add a color to mix with the remaing pink in the track under to get the color you want.
Hope this helps, Danny Hays, Universal Studios Orlando.