Making a Blue Sky Gray

[Ol23456789]

I have some video taken from the window of a moving car of the horizon and I'd like to make the sky gray while keeping everything below the horizon red and black. I applied a filter with Magic Bullet Looks that gave me the foreground I wanted but the sky stays a weird blue.

I tried adding the "Change Color" filter in Premiere, and by selecting the deepest blue in the sky I get favorable results from dropping the saturation to -100, but there is still some blue left at the very top of the screen.

Is there some rectangular mask I can add to the top of the image that desaturates everything within it?

Thanks for reading.

:violent5:

 

[cbrougham]

One way you could do this is to create a track matte. Duplicate your clip twice, and place one of those duplicates above your original clip. Create a new sequence, and cut and paste the third duplicate into it. Remove the MB effect on the duplicates.

Assuming your original clip is on V1, use your favorite color correction effect on the V2 clip to get the gray sky you want. Follow that up with a Track Matte effect, and point it to the clip on V3.

On V3, edit in the sequence you created earlier. Jump into that sequence, and place the Threshold effect on the clip. This will remap the luminance values in the clip to black and white. Adjust the effect until you've got the "sky" part of the clip distinctly white, and the "ground" part of the clip distinctly black. You can optionally follow this up with a Fast Blur effect, to slightly soften the transition from black to white.

Now when you go back to your main sequence, and right click on the V3 sequence clip, and deselect "Enable". Check that your Track Matte on V2 is set to "Luma Matte". This will (should!) result in the V3 clip being used as a traveling matte--it will change along with the video clip, instead of being a static rectangle. If it doesn't look quite right (like the matte is reversed), try placing an Invert effect on the V3 sequence--that will swap the black and white values.

Hope that helps!

 

[Shooter]

The new Magic Bullet Looks can easily power mask or grad expose the sky area to what ever color you want.

Colorista also has an excellent mask function.

 

[Ol23456789]

Thank you much for the help guys! I ended up adding a series of "Change Color" filters to the clip and selecting different forms of blue for each one, which gave me the result I was looking for. I'm going to toy around with the ways you've suggested as well.

Thanks again for your help.