How to Create a Desaturated Look for Your Movie

Desaturating your movie means lowering the degree of richness and vibrance of the colors seen on the footage. Completely removing the saturation of a video results to a black-and-white footage. The process of desaturation can create a different mood and feel to your movie and it is typically done after finalizing your edit. In production terms, altering the color attributes of your footage including adjusting its saturation is part of the colorgrading process.

A change in a video's saturation is a basic option for any video-editing program. If you are looking for a less technical program to use for the process, you can use your computer's native program, which can either be Windows Movie Maker for a PC or iMovie for a Mac. If you want more control and versatility of application of video effects in your movie, use a professional video-editing program like Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or Avid Media Composer.

1. Finish editing your movie using your preferred video-editing program.

2. Click a video clip in your program's "Editing Timeline" to highlight it. If you want to desaturate a number of clips, simply highlight all of them. Take note that in most cases, it is best to desaturate each clip separately because each shot typically differs in lighting, colors, and other image attributes.

There are also times that it is still ideal to colorgrade a group of clips together, especially if they come from the same shooting setup. In such case, you can just make minimal changes on each separate clip afterwards. Another alternative is using the copy-paste option to simply copy the exact desaturated effect you made for one clip to another.

3. Start desaturating your video by clicking the applicable desaturate option in your editing program. Take note that the exact names of editing tools, commands, buttons, and functions differ per editing program. Even their exact locations vary from one program to another. The desaturate option is typically found under the "Video Effects," "Adjustments," or "Saturation" menu in your program. Others also offer an instant effect that allows you to turn your video clip into a black-and-white or sepia footage.

In most cases, the actual button used for desaturation is actually the "Saturation" button. When this is selected, a slider appears and you can drag this to the right or left to add or lessen a video clip's saturation. This slider is usually accompanied by a space where you have the option to place a number from "0" to "100" to indicate the exact amount of saturation you want for a clip. The lower the number, the less saturation the footage receives.

4. Check your "Preview Monitor" so you can see the effect of the desaturation you applied to your footage.

5. Apply additional effects in your edited movie, if necessary.

6. Render your edited movie. Rendering refers to the process of generating the final video after the application of certain visual effects on the footage. The more effects you used and the longer the duration of the video clip where you applied your effects, the longer the rendering time. This can range anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. The technical specifications of your computer also affect the speed of the rendering process.

7. Export your desaturated movie into your desired video file format. Some of the popular formats used in video-playing programs and multimedia devices include MOV, AVI, WMV and MP4. After exporting, you can also burn your movie in DVD or Blu-ray format.