From the course: After Effects Guru: Color Grading Footage

Using the Leave Color effect - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Color Grading Footage

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Using the Leave Color effect

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- Now the black-and-white adjustment effect is quite useful to go after individual color areas, for example, targeting reds or greens, but it doesn't really let you target a specific color beyond the presets. For this, we really need to be focused, and what I find is that we can turn to the Leave Color effect. This allows us to effectively strip out the colors and just leave one color behind. In this example here, I want to leave the lizard in red and let everything else go to black-and-white. So to do this is pretty straightforward with the Leave Color effect. Let's create a new effect, where one color is left and the rest are removed. I'll start by adding an adjustment layer. Let's go ahead and type in leave and drop on the Leave Color effect. This effect allows you to select the color you want to leave. So we'll click here on the iguana. My suggestion though is that you make a few adjustments here. So what we're going to do is use Hue instead of RGB. Now I can pull down the De-color, and you'll see that the rest of the image loses color. The tolerance settings will allow more color to be left or stripped away. My preference here is the hue method, because the RGB method can be a little bit less tolerant and tends to have artifacts left behind. You see here that a lot of the leaves are left, while still color is coming out of the iguana. But the hue method tends to be a bit better targeted. Now once we get that dialed in, we can enhance this. What I'll do is bring out the color now with Vibrance. You can use the Lumetri effect or just drop the Vibrance effect directly on. And you'll notice that we can use this to really boost the color that does remain. Now what I want to do is create a custom power window, one that really guides the viewer's eye. For this, we'll add it to the adjustment layer, and using our ellipse tool, double-click to make a shape. Now let's pull that shape in. Pulling the corners, and I'll press command or control + t, I can start to scale this correctly. There we go. Be sure to adjust the masks so it's a good fit for your subject. Now we've got a mask. Let's apply the change. I'm going to add Exposure to start and drop that onto the new top adjustment layer. Now we can darken things. You might notice that it darkened the wrong area. No big deal. Just go to the mask and flip it, and we'll say Subtract. And now, using the mask controls, we can also feather that for a nice, gentle transition, or use the expansion property to pull it in or out based on the shape. Now I like that, and I like the darkening effect, but I want to go a little further. So in this case, besides just the darkening, I want to actually blur things a little bit. Let's type in the word lens, and we'll take advantage of the Camera Lens blur effect and drop it on the adjustment layer. Now we can defocus that area outside. Be careful not to go too far, or it'll look fake. But a little defocus there is quite useful, like so. And that's really helpful there, creating the look that we want. Now you'll see that the eye is guided in. The outside appears blurry, and as we move closer, it becomes in focus. Now I'm going to adjust the mask here just a little bit. Let's select the mask and bring that in a little. If I shift + click, I am actually select these points and modify them a bit. There we go. And now it better matches our subject. And you'll see what we've done there is created a nice ramping effect with blur and color to really highlight our subject. Be sure to adjust the masks so it's a good fit for your subject, but this really does allow for a very cool effect that's quite popular.

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