I'm pretty new to After Effects. I have Version 6.

We've shot some video and would like to have the background black and white with roses in color. What is the best way to do this? Are there any plugins that would help? I was looking at Keylight, but it seems like it's just for shots over a screen. There is a function in After Effects "Leave Color", but I'm hoping that there is something that can do better. This question is asked almost daily, unless you have the color footage shot over a greenscreen, you can't key it, you have to use masks and rotoscope the color footage as a copy over your B&W footage. Suggest you do a search on the forum using Pleasentville or Shindler's List. Same effect. When you're drawing masks you can actually be quite sloppy if you use the leave colour effect. Try this: 1) Drop your footage into the timeline 2) Duplicate it 3) Desaturate the bottom layer 4) Draw very rough masks around the roses - your only objective in drawing the masks is to make sure that you limit isolate the redness of the rose (ie if your roses are against a red-ish background you need a tight mask to get rid of the background, if there's nothing red nearby you can be as vague as you like) 5) Keyframe the mask shape and make sure that they stay over the roses for the whole clip 6) Now apply leave colour to the top layer and use the dropper to select the red of the roses. You should now have red roses on black and white.

Remove all colors from an image but one

A specific result that people often ask about is the desaturation (removal of color) of all of the items in a movie except for one. Some feature films that have used this look to great benefit are Sin City and Pleasantville. The basis of this workflow in After Effects is the Leave Color effect. Tip: Set the Match Colors option in the Leave Colors effect to HSB, not RGB. It's often more useful to match hue for this color operation. The most important thing is to plan ahead and use strong, unique colors for your subject. If other objects in the scene contain the color that you want to leave in your subject, then you may end up doing some rotoscoping---drawing and animating at least a rough mask around your subject and applying effects selectively to the areas defined by the mask. Of course, applying one effect is seldom enough to achieve a great look. You'll probably want to pre-process your footage to isolate the target color better, and you'll probably use the Levels effect or Curves effect to fine-tune the tone response of the final image.

Here are a couple of links to tutorials that show how to achieve this look:

Grant Swanson's Sin City tutorial on Creative COW John Dickinson's Leave Color tutorial on Motionworks

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Leave Color effect

The Leave Color effect desaturates all colors on a layer except colors similar to the color specified by Color To Leave. For example, a movie of a basketball game could be decolored except for the orange of the ball itself. John Dickinson provides an example of using the Leave Color effect on his Motionworks website. This effect works with 8-bpc color. Amount To Decolor

How much color to remove. 100% causes areas of the image dissimilar to the selected color to appear as shades of gray. Tolerance

The flexibility of the color-matching operation. 0% decolors all pixels except pixels that exactly match Color To Leave. 100% causes no color change. Edge Softness

The softness of the color boundaries. High values smooth the transition from color to gray. Match Colors

Determines whether RGB values or HSB values are compared. Choose Using RGB to perform more strict matching that usually decolors more of the image. For example, to leave dark blue, light blue, and medium blue, choose Using HSB and choose any shade of blue as Color To Leave.

Isolating a coloured object against Black and White background

May 11, 2010 1:53 AM I would like to spice up some wedding videos that I am editing. I would like to be able to convert a clip to black and white and then colour in 1 single item. For example, make a red rose against the black and white. Is this a case of like painting the rose or using a matte to isolate the already coloured rose (ie. its natural colour)?? Pretty new to AE (version 6.5, btw).

1.Mylenium, May 11, 2010 2:04 AM in reply to Jeremy Gadd Report

You need to shoot it accordingly, that is against green screen/ blue screen or cut it out with masks and work with duplicates of layers. I'm sure there's a tutorial on the "Smallville effect" somewhere, so maybe do a search.... Mylenium
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2.Todd_Kopriva, May 11, 2010 7:20 AM in reply to Mylenium Report

I think Mylenium meant 'Pleasantville', not 'Smallville'. Here's an article about this: "Remove all colors from an image but one"
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3.Mylenium, May 11, 2010 9:01 AM in reply to Todd_Kopriva Report

Ooops... Yes, you are right. It's "Pleasantville". Mylenium