For my final project, I wanted to give viewers an experience of what it’s like to have color blindness.  After some research, I found that there are several types, which are observed differently and act on different color ranges (I will elaborate on this concept in my final project post.).

My challenge was to accurately represent various types of color blindness to the viewer, by manipulating my 360 footage in post-production.

I have a good grasp of primary color correction, which is the process of “normalizing” video footage to accurately represent what the naked eye would see.  What I needed to learn was secondary color correction, which is intentionally altering the video’s color for effect.

I turned to Lynda.com for help, and I took the five hour “Premiere Pro: Color Correction and Enhancement” course.

The vast majority of the course was dedicated to primary color correction, which is an invaluable skill, but also a labyrinthine art of graphs, sliders and scopes, so I won’t go into further details here.

What I’ll focus on instead is the specific method I used to alter the color of my footage.

There are three effects in Premiere which are useful to isolate and change specific colors:

1. Change to Color
2. Paint Bucket
3. Three Way Color Corrector

1. Change to Color – using a “from” and “to” color picker you can select a color from the screen, and set a target color for it to change to. I found this useful for modifying red colors in my scene, and blending them into nearby greens.  My top tip is to keep the color “change” in the “hue” or “hue and saturation” section, and then play with the sliders for “hue” and “softness” to get the best blend.  Also the “transforming to color” setting under “change” worked well for me.
2. Paint bucket – when you first put this effect on, it looks insane, but trust me, you can get a good result. What you need to do is find the cross-hair on the video clip, and move it into the color zone you want to affect.  Once it’s hovering over the correct color area, you can click the color swatch and choose a new color to replace it.  Now play with the blending mode (“screen” is a personal favorite), slide the tolerance scale, and fidget with the fill point to get the correct color range and effect.
3. Three Way Color corrector – use the secondary color correction section. This is a little more complex, but it allows you to break up colors within tonality groups (highlights, mid-tones and shadows), so you have greater control over the individual components.

You should use the secondary color correction controls to select a specific color range on the slider.

Use the “output” to check the tonal range of the footage you’re working on, and find out whether the area you’re working on is a highlight, mid-tone or shadow.

Now you can move to the color wheels and push the color puck around to drive a certain color into the color range you have selected.

I found it was most useful to work with mid-tones first, as they generally relate to objects in your scene.

As always, the most important thing is that it looks “right”, so shoot for a better overall experience, rather than micro-managing color in each frame.