Digital Commons at Penn State

It is true that when O’Brother Where Art Thou was filmed that all of the grass and foliage was green and had to be changed digitally for the movie. The best part about this question is that everything that one would need to perform this effect is available in the Digital Commons and I’m going to show you how it works.

The first and most important part of doing any kind of special effect is planning. For this particular effect they shifted everything that was a certain shade of green into the brown color space. The reason planning is so important is because if you have any set dressing or clothing that falls within the same green color space it will also be shifted with the foliage. Therefore you would want to avoid shooting your subjects with similar shaded greens.

Now for the fun stuff, in the Digital Commons each editing computer comes with a copy of Final Cut Pro an extremely powerful piece of editing software. Inside Final Cut Pro there is a “Color Corrector 3 Way” Filter. This filter is good for correcting color, but it also has a feature called “Limit Effect” what this allows us to do is limit which colors are being changed so that the overall image stays the same except the color of the grass for our example.

To show an example of this effect I started with a nice picture of the Nittany Lion Statue
I used the Color Corrector 3 Way Filter and adjusted the limit settings to the foilage green and added in some orange to brown up the green, here are the settings.
Here is the Final Picture after using the Color Corrector with the Limit Effect,

I did this example with a still image but it can be done in the same manner with movie footage. This is one of the effects used in the movie “Pleasantville” to drop out the color of certain objects.