Colour correcting a lightsaber from blue to green

I just took on editing Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars series to make it "Canon friendly."

One of the things I need to do is change Ventress' lightsaber colour from blue to green. However I'm not sure how I would go about doing this.

I'm still a little new to editing so colour correction is mostly beyond me. There is an example always in the shot of what it should look like as she has a green one too.

I'm using Sony Vegas, if that helps.

The scene's in question:



EDIT: Just been reading into it, I don't think what I'm talking about is colour correction. Oh god, please send help xD

Zamros said:

One of the things I need to do is change Ventress' lightsaber colour from blue to green. However I'm not sure how I would go about doing this.

Click to expand...

first of all, you'll need the proper kyber crytsal. precious few of them on earth, though.

masking and rotoscoping the laser sword in each frame it's in a scene/shot.
unless there is an easier way.
i would say that's pretty much the only way to go about it.

If it was me (and I also use Vegas) I'd use the "Mask" tool (available through "Event Pan/Crop") draw round the saber and cut-it-out from the background. It can then be adjusted separately.


Here is a shot from one of my Star Trek projects for example...



As you can see in shots 1, 2 & 3, I've got the starfield, the ship and the satellite as separate masks. You can see one of the masks in shot 4. So in shot 5, I can adjust the colours separately to make a blue satellite, a red ship and a green starfield if I wanted to go crazy .


Creating this kind of thing in motion isn't as difficult as it might sound with a simple shape like a saber...

1. Draw a mask round the saber in the first frame of the shot.
2. Draw round it in the last frame. Then Vegas will make it's best estimate where the mask should be in all the frames in between.
3. Now go into the middle frame of the shot and adjust the mask to where it actually should be. Vegas will then adjust all other frames to compensate.
4. Keep making finer and finer adjustments until Vegas is guessing the frames correctly and you've got your saber separated out and ready to colour it any way you want.

If you don't have Vegas Pro you'll need to use an image editor. I usually use Gimp. It's free and loaded with options. You can even find specific plugins for lightsabers for it. Masking in gimp can be a pain, but it can create a similar effect as TM2YC has shown. You just save the image as an uncompressed PNG and drop it on a video track. You can then adjust colors in gimp or Vegas as needed.