Re-Colour only a specific part

[Alexandria]

what is the best way to re-colour the blue part ONLY in this image, leaving the gold intact?

 

[Rich54]

Tricky one. I first tried using Color Range but it wasn't satisfactory. Here's a method that may work for you.

• Open a Black & White adjustment layer above your image.
• Move the Red and Yellow sliders all the way to the right. Move all the other sliders all the way to the left.
• You get this:

• Go to the Magic Wand. Set the tolerance to 100 and un-check the Contiguous box.
• Click the magic wand on an area of white and then invert the selection.
• With that selection active, open a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer. (And then turn off the B&W adjustment layer.)
• Go into the Layer mask setting of the Hue & Sat and change the feather to about 9 pixels to get a very feathered selection.
• Click the Colorize box in the Hue & Sat layer. Separately adjust the Hue and Saturation sliders to get the new colors you like.
• Here's what it looks like in red.

• As final step, open a new layer at the top of the stack and change the blend mode to Color.
• Use a soft brush with the Flow set to about 25%. Select the gold color and paint gold over the border areas between red and gold where we can still see the original blue color showing through.
• Open another new layer with blend mode of Color. With the same soft brush, dab-in some red in the same transitional border areas to make it seem as if red is showing through instead of blue.
• Here's the final result. Note that red is probably the most difficult new color I could have chosen. This would all work much better if the new color weren't so extremely different from what you started with.

 

[IamSam]

First I tried a smart object and Camera Raw adjustment tool mask which worked well but not any better than what's been described by Rich. Then I tried both the Color Range and the Black & White Adjustment layer techniques. ALL worked about the same for me, and the end result (on all) was a layer mask that just needed a tedious amount of Brush Tool refinement to isolate the blue colors of the original image.

I wont describe another technique as Rich's works as well as the other two I tried. All I added was lots of Brush Tool work on the layer mask.

I ended up with a very complex layer mask and a Hue & Sat adjustment layer set to "colorize" clipped to the original image layer.

 

[Rich54]

I came up with another method that might be better: a Gradient Map.

• Open a B&W adjustment layer with the same settings as what I described above.
• Reduce the opacity of the B&W adjustment to about 40%. (This amount can be played with later to refine the result.)
• Open a Gradient Map adjustment layer above the B&W layer. Change the blend mode to Color.
• Set the colors of the gradient map to be gold for the light values and whatever you like for the dark values.
• If you want, you can add additional color stops into the gradient map, but for now I'm just using two colors (see settings below).

This method will put some stray gold into areas where it should not be, but the obvious ones can be masked away. What I like about this method is that it does a better job on the transitional border areas.

 

[Alexandria]

Thx a million ... love the outcome