Object Isolation Effect in Premiere Pro

Filmmaker and photographer Kyler Holland recently published an interesting video showing how you can very easily isolate an object in Premiere Pro and make it stand out.

This video demonstrates a method that can be done (possibly more easily) with other software (After Effects etc.) but for those working in Premiere, it can still be done relatively simply.

The idea is this – let’s say that you want to isolate a specific object in a frame – give it more focus than it originally received, for example for a product shot/commercial, etc. With this simple method, you can make everything else look dark and keep only your subject

So how do you do that? well it is actually pretty simple. All you need to do is go to the color tab, drag your exposure down (possibly the highlights and maybe play with the blacks/whites of the shadows as well). Now go to the effects panel of your clip and go to the Lumetri color and turn it off and mask the corners of your subject (you don’t need to make this perfect at all).

Select “mask path” and select the mask again (otherwise you won’t see it) and now you need to create more keyframes – the more you make the more accurate the tracking will be (at least at the moment Premiere has no good tracking feature like AE has so you need to do this manually – but this might change in future Premiere releases of course).

After you finished creating a number of points and fixing your mask so that Premiere will now how to move the mask around. You might need to father the mask and of course, invert it and turn the mask on.

Bonus tip – HGolland shows how you can create all sorts of effects like blinking lights (play with the exposure and by creating keyframes with more and less exposure and than selecting all of them and by right click selecting hold you will get that cool flickering effect).

Keep in mind that you can use this method to perform other similar manipulations such as making only your subject in focus and everything else blurred or everything else B&W while only your subject is in color and so on. The options are as many as your imagination.

You can find more Premiere Pro related videos on this link here on LensaVid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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