Practical Task: Colour Isolation

In some more recent film noir movies, the use of colour isolation or colour splash effects can be seen. This is where the entire scene is in black and white minus a select colour or two. This colour is almost always red. I found several tutorials on how to do this in After Effects, but I decided to use one for Premiere as I am more familiar with this program. Tutorial here.

 Unfortunately, this effect did not work very well. If I increase the colour tolerance, it just picks up the red values in Xena's hair instead of all of the red in the skirt. Though this is unsurprising for such a simple filter. I found an alternative method to create the effect in Premiere Pro here.

 

 I started by applying a black and white filter, then an RGB curves filter, and then adjusting the master curve. This increases the contrast.

I then imported the video again on a new layer and applied a chroma key with the selected colour. This "removes" a specific colour. I then added an alpha adjust so that the opacity was inverted. It didn't work.

In short, this failed. I'm not sure if it was the video format or my editing, but it was completely unusable.