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Replacing somee colors


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Sheetka

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Hi there, I'm having difficulties with replacing the colors of a certain image.
I'm doing this because of a school project where I need to create a corporate design for a company.
This corporate design contains an important color (#357f88) which I want to replace with the black desk of the next image:
156vdxw.jpg

I tried to use the replace color tool but that's not really working out great.
I saw some stuff on tutorials about color dodge or something which I tried as well but I couldn't get to select the parts of this desk I wanted to change color.

Any help how I can achieve to replace the color would be awesome, I'm quite new to photoshop and very curious about these techniques!
 
Hi Sheetka, welcome to PSGurus. If I understand, you want to change the desk to the color code you give above.


  • select the area you want to change color,
  • make a new layer above,
  • fill it with that specific color and
  • change the layer blend mode to color.
You may want to play around with different blend modes or change the opacity of the color layer. See how that works. I hope this helps :mrgreen:

color.PNG
 
Thanks for the tips, I understand that part now.
But how did you select that part of the desk like that? Did you just use the polygonal lasso tool or something? Because I tried
that but I still get ugly edges and such.
 
;}}

if you go to pixel level you can see that it is not a perfect selection. I used the quick select tool (w) for this. Often when I use this tool, I will zoom way in and correct any obvious boundary errors. The best way to select this would be to use the pen tool, but quick select will do a good job here. Make sure that hardness is fairly high -- I have ~ 80% -- and spacing is medium. When you have the time sometime, play around with different settings for this tool and you will find out how to make your selections better. Use different kinds of things to select, soft-edged, multi-colored, and so on. Using the polyganol lasso assumes you know how to use a jig saw, lol.
 
I dont mean to rain on clares parade lol but be carefull if it has to be a specific colour then changing your layer blending mode will effect your actual colour to a lighter colour if using soft light or colour. So you may have to tweak it with a hue saturation adjustment layer clipped to it and bring the lightness\darkness levels down.

But if it is in the general region and that s good enough then so be it in fact I like the lighter colour clare has done.
 
OK, change layer 2 blending mode to hard light, duplicate and change layer 3 to color or soft light. Or keep both hard light, but I don't like this because it makes the highlight too warm compared to the cool of the original.

Various combinations make the blue closer to the normal. Experiment or try Hoogle's way.

And as I said and Steve reiterated, the best selection tool for these smooth contours is the pen tool. You will likely need to follow some tutorials to get the hang of it. But don't wait too long to learn it. It is invaluable.
 
Lol okay as soon as I get home I'll try some things out, have been working on it yesterday but it didn't really work out well. The part that you recolored works for me as well with the quick selection tool, but what I wanted to achieve is to recolor the black parts of the desk. It's hard to only select the black color without also selecting a few pixels too much at the sides but I guess I'll have to look up some tutorials about that
 
First problem I see, is that you are working with a low resolution photograph.That the photo is of poor quality is the biggest problem you have here. It is difficult enough for a novice to select a smooth line since this is not a straight-line rectangular selection but curves out in the middle. And because of the image quality it is next to impossible to select every pixel and include it. With the pen tool, I made a reasonable selection and the top looks good.

Because of the shadows I believe, it is a more irregular bottom edge. The pixels do not follow the expected smooth line of the desk but bleed over and about. If you make the selection larger then you will have a color halo. So you will probably have to do some zoomed in touch up with a clone tool, brush, or healing brush.You may have to activate the black selection, invert (shift + ctl + i), zoom in and and do your touch up to match neighboring pixels. Start with low opacities. The nice thing is that if the selection is active, you don't have to worry about spilling into the blue desk color.

As for recoloring the black, there are a few steps I recommend. Activate the selection of the desk. Duplicate the desk onto its own layer. On the base layer, make a curves adjustment to turn the desk edge a light grey which will retain the shadow-highlight gradient. On the dup layer, make a hue/saturation adjustment level (make it a layer and clip it so you can tweak it later if needed), set the hue, then play with the saturation and lightness sliders.

You will need to change the blending layer mode of course, in order to keep the gradient of highlights. If I think I can guess what will work, I like to choose a blend mode and then make my hue/sat changes. Otherwise cycle through blend modes and tweak your adjustments. For this I used hard light.

Here is what I did; the extra color strip below is the solid color with the hex # you gave.

desk_color.PNG
 
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That is another way Stric9 -- I need to get more familiar with gradient maps. Cool. The blending mode technique, however, does retain the shadows and highlights quite well. The gradient mapping is more sophisticated.
 
it's more interesting to reproduce different color illumination (blue from the left window, orange from lamps)/

1. Colored bar ( I chose gradient map).

reception_1.png

2. Color map extracted from the original image

reception_2.png

3. Composited image

reception_3.png
 
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