Fall Flowers Weddings

This is the first in a short series of articles in which we will explore some uses of secondary color correction. While this is written by a Sony Vegas user for Sony Vegas users the basic concepts will apply in other non-linear editing programs as well.

The secondary color correction plug-in in Vegas is a very powerful tool with a wide range of uses from very subtle corrections to artistic or even comical effects. Before we get into achieving particular effects, let's look at how the plug-in works. The layout is divided into two sections top and bottom. The bottom section defines what elements within the image you want to be affected by the effect. The elements can be selected by defining any combination of luminance, saturation or hue ranges. There is also an eye dropper tool which will be covered in a future article. The top section defines what you want to do to those selected elements which can include changing the hue, saturation, gamma and more. In this first article we will be limiting ourselves to the hue settings in the bottom part and the saturation setting in the top part.

The Girl in the Red Dress

If you have seen the Spielberg film Schindler's List than you no doubt will remember the scene with the girl in the red dress (or coat). In an otherwise black and white film Spielberg chose to colorise the little girls red dress to draw attention to her at an emotional point in the film. While he probably did it the old fashioned way adding color to black and white film as was often done with old photographs, you can achieve the same effect using your secondary color correction. In fact, the program gives you a big head start by including a "Desaturate all but Reds" preset. Don't touch that preset! While in the most simple scene the preset might work, in most cases it will not get you a professional result all by itself.

Let's start with choosing your scene. If you are shooting something scripted and can plan ahead it will be easy. Simply make sure the red dress (or blue flower or whatever you're using) is the only thing in the shot with that color. Avoid having anything with other shades of the same color and watch out for light reflecting off the red dress and affecting another object. If you can manage all that then congratulations you can just use the preset. Now, for the rest of us. I will sometimes employ this effect in wedding videos leaving only the bouquet or yes even the little girl's dress as the only colored element in the scene. Yes it's too obvious, yes it's a little cliche, but it looks good. Although if the flower girl was actually wearing a red dress I would not recommend putting a direct visual reference to a holocaust film in the wedding video. Anyway, you can't use this effect in just any old shot. There are usually too many objects of the same color or mixed colors in the shot, so you are looking for a shot where one element already stands out because it is a different color than everything else.

Alright, so you've found your shot. What we want to do is (as the preset says) desaturate all but red. The top part of the plug-in defines what we want to do, so in this case simply turn the saturation down to zero. Assuming you didn't cheat and start with the preset you now have a black and white image. Now in the bottom half of the plug-in we want to define what we want affected. At the moment by default everything is affected so we will adjust it to tell it precisely what not to affect (red).

Since we are looking to eliminate the color red from the desaturation effect we will only be dealing with hue. You will notice the width slider is all the way up at 360. For a visual reference of what this represents just look at the chrominance color wheel at the top. With the width at 360 we are affecting all 360 degrees of the color wheel, therefore everything has been desaturated. You will also notice that the "center" slider is set to 180. This represents the angle of 180 degrees on that same color wheel.

If you turn down the width setting you will see blues and magentas showing up first. Referring back to the chrominance color wheel you will see that with the center at 180 and the width down to 180 we are now telling it to desaturate everything on the left side of the wheel. So, to leave the reds saturated you want to move the center slider to around 260 degrees so you are desaturating everything on the opposite side from red. Now you can adjust the width until just the red dress is colored. You may also want to fine tune the center slightly if the dress is a slightly more orange or purple.

There, you did it! Oh, wait, something else in the picture that didn't look red before now has red splotches in it? Try adjusting the smoothing. This will stretch the boundary of what is being desaturated and blend the borders a little.

If you still have that one stubborn red spot somewhere in the image that you don't want then it's time to employ a second effect to clean things up. This can get a little tricky if the camera or red elements are moving around a lot, but it can be done.

First, right click on the track header and create a duplicate track (or copy and paste the event on a track directly underneath the original). On the bottom track set the width of the effect back to 360 for a black and white event (or use one of the many other methods available to turn it b&w). Now temporarily mute the bottom track to make it easier to see what you're doing. In the top track add the cookie cutter plug in. Set the method to "Cut away section" and reduce the size until it is big enough to cover up the unsightly red splotch you want to get rid of. Add a little feathering to avoid any artifacts and cover up that extra red spot with your big black dot. Now unmute the bottom track and you have a girl in a red dress and the extra red in the scene has been eliminated.

Just one more tip. If the red elements in the scene (or the camera) is moving so the patch isn't always in the right place you will need to animate it using keyframes. I'll save keyframe animation for another tutorial.

For some sample images related to this article .

Sample image from Schindler's list is at

Jim Merchant is a Boston Wedding Videographer and owner of Pirates Lane Video based on Boston's North Shore. You can contact me through my website as well as find more information and demo videos. Visit me on Facebook at .