Isolate Colors in Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2017)

Color isolation is one of the most striking visual effects you can apply to footage. The idea is simple. You take one color and keep it saturated while everything else in the frame goes black and white. Think of a red rose standing out in a grayscale garden, or a bright yellow taxi on a desaturated street. It immediately draws the viewer’s eye exactly where you want it.

This effect is also known as selective color or color splash. It works best when the color you want to isolate is bold and distinct from the rest of the scene. Today we are going to walk through how to isolate colors in Adobe Premiere Pro CC using the Leave Color effect.

How to Isolate a Color in Premiere Pro

Preparing the Footage

1. Drag your footage into a sequence on the timeline.
2. Before applying the effect, use Lumetri Color to bump up the exposure, contrast, and saturation slightly. This makes the target color pop more and gives the Leave Color effect a cleaner result to work with.

Applying the Leave Color Effect

3. Go to the Effects panel and search for Leave Color (under Video Effects > Color Correction).
4. Drag it onto your footage.
5. In Effect Controls, find the Leave Color effect and click the eyedropper next to the Color swatch.
6. Move the eyedropper over your footage and click on the color you want to keep. Pro tip: hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) while clicking to make the eyedropper sample a larger area of pixels. This gives you an averaged color selection that is easier to work with than a single pixel.
7. Drag the Amount to Decolor up to 100%. This turns everything except your selected color to black and white.
8. Under Match Colors, toggle between RGB and Hue to see which gives a better result. RGB bases the selection on red, green, and blue values. Hue bases it on the color wheel. One usually looks significantly better than the other depending on the footage.
9. Adjust the Tolerance to control how much of the color range is kept. Higher tolerance keeps more similar shades. Lower tolerance is more precise.
10. Adjust Edge Softness to feather the edges of the color selection for a smoother, more natural transition.

Masking for Precision

Sometimes the color you want to isolate also appears elsewhere in the frame. A red shirt might look great isolated, but you don’t want the red exit sign in the background to show up too. Here is how to fix that with masking.

1. In the Leave Color effect, click one of the mask tools (rectangle, ellipse, or pen) just below the effect name.
2. Draw a mask around the object whose color you want to keep.
3. If the object moves, you may need to keyframe the mask path to track it.
4. Now go to the Effects panel and find Color Balance (HLS). Drag it onto the same clip.
5. Set the Saturation to -100 in the Color Balance effect.
6. Copy the mask from the Leave Color effect and paste it onto the Color Balance effect.
7. On the pasted mask, click the Invert checkbox.

Now only your masked area retains its color, and everything else in the frame is desaturated. This gives you full control over exactly what stays in color.

Tips

• Bold, saturated colors work best. Red, yellow, and bright blue isolate cleanly. Muted or earthy tones are harder to separate.
• Combine with a vignette to draw even more attention to the colored subject.
• This effect pairs well with a dreamy effect for a stylized, artistic look.

That is how you isolate colors in Premiere Pro. It is a dramatic effect that is easy to set up and always gets a strong visual reaction.