Extreme color replacement

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

There is no way you can achieve white from red through color correction. It may become a lighter gray, but not white. The producer needs to understand that. If he/she wants a white scooter then he/she better be ready to get some considerable budget adjustments. The only way to do this and get a white scooter in there is to build a white scooter in 3d, match the camera move and lighting and then composite that back in.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Michael Szalapski]

Without a screen shot to play with I can’t offer much advice. You’d need to desaturate the red, then lighten it. Perhaps you could try putting levels or curves on it after one of your desaturation passes, but to be honest, I’m with Ted; it’s going to be difficult to get it right.
I think you’d be better off reshooting. Depending on the complexity of the shot and the number of people involved it could be cheaper.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Samuele Gottardello]

let’s see if this image may help

sorry I had to crop like everything ’cause the model is a new prototype.
and this is also the reason because they can’t shoot again. the white prototype was destroyed like a month ago. very clever since now they need it to finish the ad.
wooo!
what I was asked to do is to change the red on the right with the “white” (actually is more or less a pale yellow) on the left.

[Walter Soyka]

I’d be more inclined to attempt this with a color correction tool like Colorista II, but I absolutely agree with Tudor and Michael. You are being asked to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

I’d approach this by pushing the colors away from red and towards yellow, and selectively desaturating warmer tones (to avoid completely desaturating the green and blue reflections). You’ll have to really crank the gamma on your midtones, which will show all kinds of ugly noise which must be reduced.

Honestly, I wonder if there isn’t some other heavily-stylized creative approach to take to mitigate this work.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Michael Szalapski]

Here’s a rough approximation of the effect:
1587_scooter.psd.zip
My machine with AE is in the middle of a render with Cinema 4d, but my web computer’s got Photoshop on it so that’s what you get. I only used effects you can get in AE though. 🙂
On the hue/saturation layer’s edit drop down, choose red to see what I did.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Craig Whitaker]

Last summer I had to paint a metal pole back into a scene for the same reason. What worked in the end was filling my root shape with a solid and painting in the highlights. Granted, it was a pole not a bike and it was only 20 frames, but it’s a least one approach. Best of luck.

Craig Whitaker
MFA Candidate
New York University
http://www.craigwhitaker.net

[Samuele Gottardello]

Please can you all explain this to my producer?
this morning as I showed him my “poor” results he said:
“Impossible! how can be so difficult?”

(-__-)”

anyway I really appreciate all your efforts, guys you really rock!
special thanks to Michael Szalapski, so kind to send a psd.
let’s say that I’m kinda close to a “not so bad at all” solution, thanks to you guys!

[Jim Arco]

Whenever I need to do extreme color corrections, I convert to L-a-b color space and work in the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels. In this case, the color of interest is red, so you would be using some extreme curves in the ‘a’ channel.

Since AE doesn’t provide an option for L-a-b color, you’d have to open the footage in Photoshop, convert to smart object, then switch to L-a-b color space and work on the ‘a’ channel there.

…..admittedly a long-shot, but might be worth a try.

Jim