Joe Maller: Joe's Filters: Joe's Radial Desaturate

Joe's Radial Desaturate is a part of Joe's Filters, a shareware package of utility and image processing tools for Final Cut Pro.

What it does

Radial Desaturate is a filter for Final Cut Pro which provides exact hue-based control over the desaturation and colorization of clips. This filter's results are similar to the look of Black and White film shot with various colored filters.For a simpler desaturation filter, take a look at Joe's RGB Desaturate.

The filter starts out as a colorization of the image, desaturating then moves the image towards a grayscale equivalent of the colorized image.

If you are curious about FXScripts and Final Cut Pro, I also wrote a page about the FXScript behind Joe's Radial Desaturate...

Example Images

The examples below show different resulting gray tones depending on the source color channels. Notice how the tomatoes and oranges shift from light to dark gray depending on the color target. Mixing partial desaturation with the original image creates a color space similar to old film or television.

Original Image
saturation: 0% hue angle: -90° original: 0%	saturation: 0% hue angle: -200° original: 0%
saturation: 0% hue angle: 22° original: 0%	saturation: 60% hue angle: -90° original: 0%
saturation: 40% hue angle: -200° original: 33%	saturation: 36% hue angle: 25° original: 25%
saturation: 100% hue angle: -15° original: 20%	saturation: 40% hue angle: 215° original: 25%

The Controls

• Saturation (0 - 100%)

  This value indicates how much of the color to remove from the image. At 100%, the image will be shown only in whichever channel is indicated with the Hue Angle selector. At 0%, the image is completely desaturated from the specified channel mix.

• Hue Angle (0 - 360°)

  Hue Angle describes the channel or channel mix that will be used to represent the image. Red is 0°, Green is 120° and Blue is 240°. Any point on the color wheel can be described and used as the source of the Saturation slider.

• Original (0 - 100%)

  The Original slider indicates how much of the original image will appear in the result. 0% will completely apply the effects of the Saturation and Hue Angle selectors, 100% would show no change.