Hi guys, as you can see I'm very new to the forum and I'm hoping you can all provide me with a bit of help. Could anyone tell me the name of the digital technique where the film is converted into black and white, and prominent items / objects are left remained in colour such as red etc.
It's a technique I keep seeing nowadays in lots of films, and it looks really jazzy. Also, could anyone tell me how to go about doing this and with what software. I presume its frame by frame digital editing but it would be cool anyway just to know.
It's in Sin City if anyone wants to know, where red is mostly the colour that is foregrounded.
Thanks everyone, I hope you know what I'm talking about 🙂 Best wishes Vincent
Thank god isn't frame by frame like in the 50's and 60's, that would be a pain. I'm not sure the exact term for it, but I know the methods name, but the digital technique is quite easy. You just desaturate all other colors in the shot using your editing software.
If there was a rose in a blue vase, with a yellow background, you would just desaturate all blue's and yellows, and it would look black and white except for the leftover red.
What Sin City usually had to do was paint the object light green, and then would desaturate everything else, then after that shift all greens to reds.
Hopefully that makes sense. It requires careful planning, for example if you want a red hat on a black and white person, you will have to have a green/blue hat because if you simply left all red, the pigment in the skin would remain.
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In Sin City the Sick Yellow guy was actually dark blue on set.
RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA
RJSchwarz
Yeah I heard they had to get some weird purple fluid for the scenes where the blood was pure white and there were people constantly offcamera shining a blacklight on it.
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The name really depends on how you do it; in the worst case you'll be rotoscoping every single frame to individually mark the pixels that you want to keep, in the best case you just remove all the other colors from the frame.
Fusion was used for at least some of the shots in 'Sin City', and there's an example of how to remove most colors from a frame near the start of the '06_ColorCorrectors.flv' file here:
http://www.neufgiga.com/partage_neuf.php?share=LNK8448456a0a53d7a22
They call it 'color suppress', I'm not sure whether that's the official name for doing it the easy way :). I know Premiere used to have a filter to do the same, I think they called it 'color pass', because there you specified which colors to let through rather than which colors to turn to gray.
Edit: actually, they've got a couple of 'Sin City' shots in that video too, though not those specific ones.
Oh right, thanks guys for the help ?? You've made my day, thanks again. Vincent
if nothing else, you can do frame by frame. If you want, just export your footage as a film strip and import it into photoshop. THere you can convert the film strip to b&w by going to mode and changing from rgb to b&w, then change it right back to rgb, and then use the history tool to fill the color back in on the object you want. Of course this takes quite a long time but is good if your shot wasnt set up for the other methods.
