Changing BLUE to BLACK?
 

I'll be shooting a scene in which I need a BLACK passenger van. Unfortunately, nobody seems to rent black passenger vans in my price range.

I've been able to rent a DARK BLUE one and I'm wondering how best to shoot the scene to make the "dark blue" seem "blacker."

I'm shooting on the Canon XH A1 (24f), outdoors during daylight hours. I have Adobe Premiere Pro 2, After Effects, and Magic Bullet 2.1.

Is there anyway to locally tweak the color in the shot? Or must I affect the entire image to get what I want?

Any advice would really be appreciated.

Thanks,
Rene

I haven't played around with it too much yet, but PPro 2 has secondary color correction... So, you should be able to select and tweak just the colors of the van without really affecting colors in the rest of the scene. You could also fake it if you get creative with your lighting- or if you shoot the dark blue van at night under street lamps.

if your bg is a different enough hue, isolation/color correction on the blue would be really easy. if that is not the case, you would have some masking/roto work which, depending on the length of the shot and fg elements, would be of varying complexity.

just off the cuff, spill suppressor comes to mind in the keying tools.
it will allow you to choose that particular blue and suppress it to black.
might be a quick answer.

It would be easier to make the blue another color like red or green, because you could use a hue shift. To make it black however you will have to affect lightness and saturation, since the normally lit areas of a black van will be dark grey, the shadow areas black and the highlights will be light gray/white.

Hi Rene,
Try "change color" in After Effects, you select with the color picker wich color you want to change and dial the change. Also you can try change to color that is slightly different. Both are standards in AE. Of course you´ll want to avoid the same color of the van in other parts of the frame.