Colour Correction in Adobe After Effects

My first experiment with colour correction was inspired by a Danish Documentary called ‘Armadillo’ (See ‘Colour Correction Inspiration page).

I used helmet camera footage from a recent exercise I attended with the Army Reserve as the subject matter wasn’t visually far from the content in ‘Armadillo’.

Within Adobe After Effects I utilised various color correction tools including ‘curves’, ‘tint’ and ‘tritone’. The aim was to create a blue coloured filter over the entire footage to produce a ‘cold’ and surreal atmosphere. The overall picture was darkened as well, this was to aid contrast between light and dark as the helmet camera (GoPro Hero 2 HD) produced fairly overexposed footage. 

I also experimented with a green filter effect aside from the blue, however, I decided to develop the blue into the final piece as this was the colour technique I was trying to replicate.

The below screen shots demonstrate the before and after colour correction techniques

Using Adobe After Effects for the first time

Before attending the specific workshop at university,I decided to follow what looked like an easy(ish) tutorial for my first attempt at using Adobe After Effects. My intention was to produce a ‘proof of concept’ clip lasting just a few seconds to show a very basic understanding of a particular technique within the software.

I chose to try out a tutorial found on YouTube demonstrating how to make objects ‘appear tofloat’.

First of all I had to acquire a green screen from somewhere, purchasing a suitably coloured bed sheet was adequate for what I wanted to do. Using just the camera on an iPhone 4 and help frommy housemates, I filmed the two sequences that were required for the tutorial.

What I’ve taken away from this first experiment with green screen and after effects is theimportance of shooting in a well lit environment and with a much higher quality camera as this makes the post production process much smoother and easier. Also, physically placing objects in relation to the green screen is important as shadows caused by the object ruined the clip this time around.