Help with selective colour....

[Diego Garcia]

hi ,

Was wondering if anyone can advise how to change colours in either lightroom or photoshop.

Basically, I am looking to tie colour and tone in on a shot and I cant always ensure the model has clothes to suit the back drop. Example, I am shooting a guy in a pub next week and the walls are brown, so I have asked him to wear brown.

Anyhow, when I look at work by the current darlings of photography (Lovegrove, Harkness etc) I note that they say that they changed the shirt or changed the wall in PP.

So, that is the question. Any help appreciated. I have posted an example pic. Lets say that I may have wanted a grey shutter, or equally a red cardigan.

thanks,

Pete.

 

[pxl8]

It's all done using the different blend modes. To convert from red to grey I picked white as my colour and painted over the shutters in Saturation mode.

Normally Hue mode can be used to switch from one colour to another but as grey has little or no saturation that won't work. Instead I duplicated the layer and on the bottom copy used a huge red brush in multiply mode to change the cardigan. Then I added a layer mask to the top layer and painted that to reveal the red in the right places - note I left the buttons alone

 

[Mustard shots]

You can also try image>adjust>hue/saturation and hit the colourise button (bottom right). You then have a very direct control of hue/saturation and can even use the colour picker to select mid-light and mid-dark tones (upper and lower colour tabs) from another image and play with saturation if you need to match colour. But I'd leave the the lightness control alone and do it in Levels first. As above, make your selections and do it with adjustment layers - nice and easy.

Hope that helps

 

[Diego Garcia]

Thanks - will give it a go this week and see how it goes along.

 

[CT]

As usual, there's umpteen ways to tackle this job, but my preferred method would be like so:-

First step - use the desaturation brush and desaturate the roller blind bg completely. Use a small brush when working around the edges of the geezer to get a good clean line where the colour remains.

Accuracy is everything, so take your time. You end up with this image. Save the image at this stage with a new file name.

Now draw a mask roughly just around the jumper - leave plenty of space around it so you get the whole jumper. Now COPY and PASTE the jumper as a new image. Don't cut and paste or you'll end up with a big hole in your working image.


Next step. You now have your jumper on a transparent background. Using freehand masks, carefully and accurately, chop away all the surplus area around the jumper till just the jumper remains. Don't try to do it all in one go - remove a bit at a time. Again accuracy is everything so take your time.

Once you have a clean edge all around the jumper, desaturate it completely to mono - this helps with adding a new colour. Select your chosen colour and using the fill tool on very low opacity, click on the jumper one or two times until you have a very light red tinge to the jumper.

The actual shade and saturation doesn't matter at this stage as we'll adjust it later. The main thing is to make sure you can still see the textures and the light and dark areas of the jumper to preserve the modelling- if you overfill and it goes too opaque it will look very false. Don't worry about filling over the buttons at this stage.

Your image should now look something like this, but the actual shade/saturation isn't important just yet. Make sure you save this image at this stage in case things go tits up and you need to go back to it.

Save it in the native file format of your editing package to preserve the transparent bg.

Now copy your jumper and paste it into your working image as a new layer. Carefully line it up over the original jumper. Now using a circular mask tool cut out each button so that the original button colour from the image underneath shows through. Finally play with colour saturation, gamma, contrast - any filter which gets you the shade of red you're looking for in your jumper. Now flatten the image (merge all layers) and it's a good idea to save it now in case things go wonky.

Finally have a good critical look around the edges for any sign of colour bleed or bits of red missing. Touch in any bits that need doing with any smear type brush.

It's not as difficult as it probably sounds and drawing the freehand masks will get your mouse dexterity improved like nothing else. There's no magic solutions - the best results involve a little time and effort. I know I'm probably riding an old hobby horse to death, but learning to use freehand selective masks is the key to doing pretty well anything you like in editing!

 

[lee]

Thats a superb tutorial CT thanks

 

[Diego Garcia]

Thanks CT will give it a go. Looks hard