Tools to Create a Color Effect from Greyscale to Color

[Cory Petkovsek]

Your effect is desaturation (hsl effect) which goes from color to to black and white. Apply it to an adjustment layer over the whole film. At the end you animate a mask that blocks out the effect, thus sweeping away the desaturation effect.
Cory

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Cory Petkovsek
Corporate Video

[Walter Soyka]

[Jay Wesley] “I’m about to pursue shooting a short film. Most of the film will be in black and white. Around the end of the film, I need an effect that will be able to sweep away or dissolve the black and white from the footage or environment and turn the environment back into color again. Are there any tools in After Effects CS5 that can help me achieve this or do I need to use a different program?”

Are you shooting color that you need to convert to black and white, or black and white that you need to colorize? They are totally different looks with totally different workflows — and totally different labor requirements.

If you are shooting color and need to convert to B&W in post, check out AE CS5’s new Black & White effect [link]. Rather than just draining the color out of the image with desaturation, which can leave your B&W looking pretty flat, this effect lets you control how the different colors in your image are represented in B&W. Put this effect on an adjustment layer at the top of your shot, and you can fade it in or out by animating its Opacity.

If you’re colorizing black and white footage, CS5’s Rotobrush [link], an automated rotoscoping assist tool, would be very helpful. You could roto out each separate region you want to apply a color to.

I think it would be far easier to get a good-looking B&W shot from color footage than it would be to get a good-looking color shot from B&W.

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

[Jay Wesley]

Thanks. I do have another question. If my film is in black and white and one of the characters is in all black and white with a few blotches of color to his skin. How would I achieve this effect? Wouldn’t I use the rotobrush tool?

[Walter Soyka]

[Jay Wesley] “Thanks. I do have another question. If my film is in black and white and one of the characters is in all black and white with a few blotches of color to his skin. How would I achieve this effect? Wouldn’t I use the rotobrush tool?”

If there are pretty clearly defined areas that you want to add color to on the original footage, yes, that’s a good place to start.

If you need to add this entirely in post, it gets a lot trickier. They used something like 30 markers on Jackie Earle Haley’s mask in Watchmen to track for the Rorschach effect. You have to shoot with the effect in mind.

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

[Mark Suszko]

Your simplest path is to shoot color, then shade it to B&W in post, and you can mask and track sections that have to stay color while the rest stays B&W. IF it is something small you want to retain color, like a hankie, you might make the hankie chromakey green to make it easier to separate out the colors later, then colorize the green to any shade you need in post.