Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello everyone welcome to a Colorization Video Tutorial Series
And in this series we'll be going over how to colorize media
Now, I'll be going over how to do so and also what colorization exactly is
In this series I will be using Adobe After Effects. Although you can use other programs like Photoshop, Gimp, Illustrator, etc
But I'm just using this for the simplicity of colorizing video and photos, and it makes it a lot easier
Now all the project files I'll be doing for the 5 parts of the tutorial are available for download. There's a link in the description for the .zip file
And once you load that up you'll have a .zip file, just extract it. You'll have five folders. Introduciton, methods, photo, video, and outro
In each of these you'll have the After Effects file as well as each of the source images or video that you need for it
I also went through the liberty to create these in CS3, so they're available for Adobe After Effects CS3 and above
I'll be doing this in Creative Cloud though because I just find it a lot faster on my computer to use
So first of all, what is colorization? You might be saying, why is there just a picture of a leaf here?
Well this picture was originally black and white. And by applying effects, I colorized it
This is the original. I added some color to the leaves. As well as these little leaf pathways, I added color to
So colorization is adding color to an image. It doesn't necessarly have to be black and white, and doesn't have to be realistic
I could make this blue if I wanted. In fact, that would be really easy to do, but I'm not going to do that at the moment
So basically I can just adjust any of the colors I want, and make it look however I want
But most of the time colorization is to make it look realistic, or at least close to realistic
But you can also stretch it out a little bit and make stylized looks
If we do look at the original leaf, it's a little bit different here. You can see if we have this Comparison Comp here
The original leaf is this one on the left here, and the colorized one, after turning it black and white, is on the right here
And you can see this on is actually kind of bland. And this one is kind of spiced up
So colorization can add a lot of fullfilling looks to your content, which is the great thing about it
Now all of these After Effects files that are allowed to be downloaded, they are all organized so that you have comps like Colorized Leaf, Comparison Leaf
Colorized Fire, Comparison Fire. And they will also have as you will see in the future tutorials, comps that allow you to colorize them
And then immediately compare it with the original in the comp next to it
So that's the great thing about these tutorials, and let's go ahead and get introduced to colorization
So obviously I'm using adjustment layers if you're not aware, to apply color to these. Now what effect am I using?
If you go to effects here, I'm using a Color Balance effect. And basically using this effect I'm applying color and adding color to these black and white images
Now with the leaves, I just started messing around with these values
I mostly added some green, as you can see, the Highlight Green, Midtone Green, and a tiny bit of the Shadow Green
And I also took out some of the blue. Because if I increase the blue here, you can see it's a little bit of a phony-green. So this makes it a little more realistic, just messing around
And also I checked Preserve Luminosity, to preserve any of the shades that were in the original black and white photo
After some tweaking, I also did the same thing to these inner things, because this just looks fake
But when I do this and add a little bit of a yellowish orange color to the center, it works perfectly
And the great thing about this method is I am able to make colorization look great also in these blurred parts because of the depth of field
You might be asking how did you do it in these certain specific sections. Well all I did was use masks
I cut out certain areas using the pen tool here. Same with the leaves, I cut them out
Looking back at the comparison, you can see here there are some areas that didn't colorize, such as here and here
But it's really up to you, I mean I've made this look instead of like it's in the shade somewhere kind of. Or this is a kind of a sunny background
This makes it look like it's more next to some kind of white building. It's all in your imagination, so the possibilities are quite endless
And not only can you do it for photos, but you can also colorize video. And if we take a look at this, this is actually colorized footage here
This originally black and white, so just take a preview
If we look at a comparison here with the original, you can see that the second one on the right, which is the finished colorized version
Almost looks better than the one on the left which is kind of interesting. The fire itself doesn't necessarily look better
But everything else seems to look better because this has a general blue tint, and with the colorization we took a lot of that out
If we look at the original, I used some different methods to actually do this
I have my black and white footage here, I'll just turn off all these layers. This is my black and white
And instead of using adjustment layers and using that Color Balance effect, what I did is I created actual Solids
So say like here for these walls, if I turn this on you can see there's a mask around these walls here
So I cut out basically the walls with this layer. And I applied, here I'll turn up the opacity all the way
This is it would originally look like. I applied a color mode, and then I reduced the opacity to about 33
And a lot of the times you use this method, you use solids, opacity, and feathering is how you get the effect. As well as of course the masking
I also have this Null Object here because this is actually shaky footage. So I tracked this wall here, that way I would have to do less keyframing on these masks
As you can see here I have made several keyframes to make these masks follow. You can see at the top up here, they're moving because the footage moves and I had to track them
But tracking and doing this is a very good method which we'll be going over in the next tutorial, all the methods used to colorize footage
Next, I have the fire bottom. This is the bottom shade of the fire. So if we turn that on, we have a nice yellow color
And it remains pretty nice throughout the whole thing. And then I have the fire top, which kind of finishes it
If we turn off the bottom here, you can see we're just adding just a little more detail and color. We could have changed this to make it more dramatic
But I like the subtlety of it. And for this we kind of made a big mask around, and we got away with that, so
We made a few little masks down here where there's the other fires, but
Finally, we have a smoke layer, we have this smoke that's coming out of the fire. For this we also just did a general area
And we didn't even track it yet which is my mistake, but there we go
So that's actually a very simple and efficient to make colorized footage
Now basically what we do is based on the color of these solids is how we get these different looks
I could change the colors if I wanted. If I go into the Solid Settings here
I could maybe make the walls maybe a redish color if I wanted to
Basically just go in, make sure Preview is on, and we could change it to like a red
Maybe the heat is getting to the walls
It's all up to you, and it just takes some messing around
But as mentioned we will be going through all of these in the next tutorial. All the methods we will be going over
So once again, these nice Comparison Comps show you your Colorized Comp that you've done yourself. Following along with the tutorial
Versus the orignal footage. And maybe to see if it looks better or even more stylized
So in the next tutorial we will be going over the methods of colorizing and the methods we'll be going over in this series
And go ahead and use this file if you want to look around, and yeah see you next time
Also don't forget to hit that subscribe button in the bottom right
It's there for a reason so you can see when the next tutorials come out