In our film there is one scene shot in March where the grass is mostly dead, so it's that dead yellow color. We need to make it look like summer grass. The actors walk across it so we were playing around with after effects "change to color". It isolated the grass really well, but we can't figure out how to make it look like the right color. No matter what we try it looks like fake neon easter grass! You'd think it'd be as easy as choosing the right color in the "To:" box, but it doesn't look anything like the color we choose. Sometimes the darker the color we choose the lighter the color it becomes.

I'm not familiar at all with this effect.

Any suggestions on the best way to turn dead grass into summer green grass? (without having to manually mask out every frame of the actors walking across it)

Any suggestions on the best way to turn dead grass into summer green grass? (without having to manually mask out every frame of the actors walking across it)

Secondary color correction using the Color Finesse plugin (ships with AE) might work. There's a tutorial for it on CCow. (http://library.creativecow.net/devis_andrew/Secondary-Color-Correction_AE/1) You'll perhaps want to watch the first tutorial in the series to give you some context for this one. IDK.

Something to be aware of: Grass isn't really green, but a yellowish green.