[Philtimm]

eltopo wrote:

Make a mask of the shirt and change the HUE of it 😀

Whilst I admire your succinctness, it isn’t that simple! The shirt we’re matching to is an even blue colour, whilst the one we are changing is white with blue and red stripes of varying width.

My struggle – and it IS an epic one – is how to get rid of the stripes without colour correcting all of the texture out of the shirt and ending up with a flat colour that looks like animation.

Phil

[Philtimm]

A very helpful chap replied to me via email. I’ve taken the liberty of posting his reply and my response to the forum in case anyone finds his advice (and my lack of ability!) interesting!

– Philip Timm
Edit Video
—-

>Hi Phill,
>Can you send me one or two stills. Maybe I will be able to make a good
>CC using keyer that will help you to fix the color of the shirt. There
>is no Color Warper in Smoke 5 is it? As for the dissolves I suggest that
>you make the full length of the incoming and outgoing shot. What I mean
>is to start working on the shot at the moment the dissolve starts or
>ends and then make a dissolve between them again, that should result in
>a transition only between the part of the shot which was corrected .
>Worked for me very well in the past ( Octane with Smoke 5 ;). Anyway if
>you can’t send anything than try to play with separating the channels in
>CC and combine that with adjusting the histogram so as to be able to
>pull a mate for each color and then combine them with Logic Ops (ADD
>mode)and roto the result to get a nice white gray shirt which then
>easily can be color corrected to get the blue you need.
>
>Hope that helps you a bit.
>Cheers
>Kamen

Hi, Kamen! Thanks for your quick response!

I’ve attached 3 tif files for you to play with, if you want. 2 are the problem shirt, one close up, one wide, the third is the shirt I am trying to match to. They are PAL res (720×576) LZW compressed TIF files.

I’ve had to black out the face of the artist as the client is VERY secretive about the project. You still might be able to figure out
who it is, though…!

Regarding your advice, I might be being very stupid, but when you say “separating the channels in CC”, do you mean suppress everything but R, rendering that, suppress everything but G, rendering that, and so on to seperate? I can’t see any other way of doing that…

Then manipulating them with the histogram tool…hmmm…I don’t know if the stripes aren’t different enough to seperate, but I can’t get the histogram to isolate much of anything….as I say, I’m really only an operator, not an artist!

If you think it’s really not possible to do well, please say so! Given the source material, I wouldn’t be surprised.

In my experiments, I’m finding that any CC changes I do to try and “de-contrast” the stripes away renders the whole shirt as pure white, and any CC I do to make it blue makes it look horribly artificial, as it’s essentially only 1 flat colour across the whole shirt. Trying to maintain some of the original texture is proving impossible 🙁

Another possibility is to defocus the shirt, so that I CC a slightly blurred shirt through my luma-key matte…but I don’t know.

Any thoughts you have would be VERY gratefully received!

Regards,

Philip Timm

[Author]

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