When we really want a color to pop, we can isolate that color. What this means is taking the color, and making it the only color that has any saturation in the footage. This works really well with colors that pop. For example, a lot of times this effect is applied to a flower, or a bright fire. Isolating the color is also a great way to draw attention to a certain point of shot, as our eyes will naturally look at what is in color first. In this tutorial, we are going to be talking about isolating color.
How to Isolate Colors in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2017)
- Drag your footage to create a new sequence. Trim the video down the clip how you would like.
- Use Lumetri to bump up the exposure, contrast, and saturation. This will make the color pop a little bit more, and make it easier to isolate the color.
- Go over to effects and find the “Leave Color” effect. Click and drag this on to the footage.
- Now go up to Effect Controls, go down to the leave color effect, and click on the eye dropper next to color.
- Move in to your footage with the eye dropper selected and select the color you want to isolate.
- Pro Tip: You can hold down the ctrl (cmd on a mac) key to make the eye dropper bigger. This will make it take an average of a square of pixels. This allows you to grab a color that is more centered, making it easier to isolate the color.
- Then go up to the top of the leave color and drag up the amount to decolor to 100%. This will isolate only your color.
- Now go down to “Match colors” and toggle it back and forth from “RGB” to “Hue”. See if one is better than the other. The RGB bases it selection off the RGB values, while the Hue bases its off the color wheel. They both will give slightly different effects, but usually one is a lot better than the other. Choose whichever is better.
- Go up to the tolerance and edge softness and move these around a little bit to get the amount of color selected that you want. Increasing the tolerance will increase the amount of color that is selected. Increasing the softness will feather the selection of color, softening the edges of the selection.
Masking Only Your Selection
- Once you have the color isolated like you would like, it is time to make sure that is the only color selected. Go to the Leave Color effect and go to the mask settings right beneath the name.
- Grab one of these mask settings and create a mask around your object. If it’s a moving object, you may need to animate the path.
- Once you have the mask created, go to the effects tab and find the Color Balance (HLS) effect. Drag it on to your footage. Go to the saturation knob in this effect and turn it to -100.
- Click on the mask created in the Leave Color Effect. Copy and paste it on to the Color Balance (HLS) effect.
- Go to the newly pasted mask, and click the invert button.
- Now only the selected area is isolated, and the rest of the shot is de-saturated! Your color has been isolated.
