Creating a Technicolor look in After Effects without plug-ins

This is a basic tutorial on how to achieve a Technicolor-style look for your footage in After Effects. It's very straightforward and only takes a few minutes. I combined a few of the methods shown on this topic to create the effect. Kudos to JustinZ, FigChrystie, and Jairen for the pictures and head start on this.

Here's how to do it:
(When referring to effect and filter settings I'm only listing the things that need to be changed.)


Create a new composition
Duplicate it
Load your footage into Comp 1
Apply the sharpen, levels, and color balance filters (in that order)
Close the effect controls window
Poke the eye out of the layer so you can't see it (screen should now be black)
Set the blending mode to lighten
Duplicate the footage twice (should now have 3)

Alter the filters like so:

Image 1
Sharpen = Sharpen Amount (5) (or to taste)
Levels = Red Output White (0), Blue Output White (0)
Color Balance = Shadow Green Balance (100)

Image 2
Sharpen = Sharpen Amount (5)
Levels = Green Output White (0), Blue Output White (0)
Color Balance = Shadow Red Balance (100)

Image 3
Sharpen = Sharpen Amount (5)
Levels = Red Output White (0), Green Output White (0)
Color Balance = Shadow Blue Balance (100)

Now un-hide all of the layers
Click on the other composition you made earlier and drag Comp 1 into it.
Add the Hue/Saturation filter
Set the master Saturation to 35 or so


You're done! Simple, huh? Now you have a look that resembles an old Technicolor-style coloring process. You can of course change little details to taste, but this is the quickest way to get the look that was shown in the original thread. You can see my results here. (Just a note, only the first two images on this page were created with this tutorial - the others were done with miscellaneous plug-ins.)


I hope this was helpful! Let me know if you couldn't get it and I'll do what I can.

Enjoy!

 

Well done, DV. I'm glad my idea worked, and even MORE glad someone MADE it work.

 

Score!

I don't need this effect in any forseeable future, but good work bud.


-Vaportrail

 

That's great DV, awesome work.

As an added piece, I found that I preferred the finished product by "ticking" the Preserve Luminosity option on the Color Balance effect for each layer.

I'll try to post some images to show you what I mean.

EDIT: Here we go, three images.

First Image : Original Footage

[image=http://copperraven.com/images/test/AEOrig.jpg]

Second Image : Effect Used, No Preserve Luminosity

[image=http://copperraven.com/images/test/AENoLum.jpg]

Third Image : Effect Used, Preserve Luminosity On

[image=http://copperraven.com/images/test/AELum.jpg]

 

Oh man.. now we just need to find a way to make it look like it was filmed from a camera from the 70s or the 80s.


Wait. I changed my mind.
Don't do that.

Ever.




THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION LIVES!!
=)

 

Is it just me, or do Jairen's first two images look exactly the same?

 

Its not just you.

And like that...he's gone.

 

Thanks for the comments guys. Glad the process worked!


Yeah Funk I'm not too sure about the first two pics either. They do look a lot alike...

Jairen - thanks for the note about preserve luminosity. I tinkered with it during my tests but never went the whole way with it. Good to know.

 

Well done, but I thought you wanted to show how to do the "camera shake" thingy from SAVPRVtRyan

 

The Saving Private Ryan look you mean (camera shaking) is achieved by increasing the shutter speed of your camera (to about 1/500 IIRC). If your camera has a manual shutter speed option you can do this effect very easy.

 

EDIT: Lost the thread of conversation. Don't mind me.

Yeah. Shutter speed. You can't really fake it digitally, because a large part of the look is the lack of motion blur.

 

Ripley - I'm still messing with that one. My camera doesn't have a manual shutter adjustment but I was toying with an idea on how to do that "jittery" look anyway. I plan on throwing the bleach bypass filter on there too if I can get it working. I'll let you know if I am able to pull it off or not.


EDIT:
You can't really fake it digitally, because a large part of the look is the lack of motion blur.
My camera has a "frame mode" it can shoot in so I was going to attempt a tricky framerate conversion and see what happens. I have no clue if it will work lol.

 

The first two look the same to me as well...

 

Interesting test, but I'm not sure whether there's anything truly special going on...?

Just so you know, I followed your instructions on all three layers, and checked the Preserve Luminosity function, and then applied the Hue/Saturation filter.

I then compared it to my original footage, which simply had the Hue/Saturation filter applied.

The result? No difference in the colors whatsoever. I laid the original footage (with H/S applied) over the "Technicolor" test, and turned the layer on and off to see if there was any change.

Now, with Preserve Luminosity disabled, the picture was a bit brighter, but apart from that, I'm not seeing any radical difference in the way the colors are presented.

 

(Fig and/or JustinZ, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, this is the best way I could describe the process.)
Essentially what the process does is strip the footage down to individual color channels and then alter the ranges of those channels and how they are handled. By using the "lighten" blending mode the channels are then merged together to create a new image.
The best example of this that I have seen thus far is the original image that was posted in the other coloring thread which I used for my tests, because it has a wide range of colors in it so there is a lot to compare.
There is a big difference between the "normal" picture and the "technicolor" one - the colors are more vibrant and give the footage a different feel. Plus the sharpen filter gives the image a little bit of a film look due to the increased crispness and slight extra grain.

Best thing I can suggest is to try it with the original image and see if you still can't find a difference. Let us know what you come up with and feel free to post your test images. Good luck!

 

Appreciate the explanation; I do understand how the color separation process is supposed to work, and I don't want to sound ungrateful 'cuz I definitely appreciate the hard work you put into the effect!

But in fact, I am able to achieve just about the exact same results simply by taking the raw footage, applying a Hue/Sat filter with master saturation value of 35, and then applying Levels to the RGB channel with a gamma of 1.45. There are only very subtle differences that I can detect.

Maybe you could verify this on your end? Give it a try, see if your results are much different from mine...

 

Thanks for the update and for trying the effect out in the first place. I'm all for new ways of learning things, that's why I tried this effect. I went through the steps you did and the result is very close to what I had originally done. The main difference is the depth of the color channels but you are correct in that it is very slight. I appreciate you taking the time to explain your results to me - I'm going to be sure to remember that method as well for future effects. Great stuff!

 

Brilliant DV! Thank you so very much for figuring this out. I had been playing with something along the same lines, but after tweaking what you posted here a bit it's perfect.

 

Glad it helped JediMasterBuck. However all I really did was take the information from the other thread and shuffle it into After Effects - JustinZ, FigChrystie, and Jairen were the ones that came up with the original theory. Want to make sure credit goes in the right direction(s). Thanks for the post.

 

Apologies for confusing everyone. The "original" original version was incorrect. I had the wrong "eye" selected when I saved the frame out. I've corrected this now, so you'll see the right differences between all three shots.

 

I hate when that happens...

 

click
here is 4 difrent ways i proccessed the save video the upper right is the raw. lower right is dv's method
lower left is pixel magics color timing
and upper left is dv's method over the top of pixels color timing.
i think the two work well together.

 

If you have that project saved, apply the four different methods to a better reference image, with a bunch of muted colors in it.

 

I second the request.

 

hope this is better{/link]
1. is the raw photo
2. is dv's technicolor
3. pixelmagics color timing
4. both
i think i still like a hybrid of the two but might need to be tweaked a bit