Replacing Color In Photoshop

Portrait, Color Replaced

I recently posted our Thanksgiving Day family portrait and today wanted to show how I modified it.  The only direction I gave to the family for the picture was “wear something solid-ish on top, and something denim on the bottom”.  As you see in the picture at this link, we all ended up in rather muted colors except my youngest son who had a bright yellow shirt on.  I was busy thinking about how to add fill to the shot, position us reasonably without taking all day to do it, etc. (I should have spent a bit more time on the positioning).  So, when the bright yellow shirt was pointed out to me I thought to myself, “Whatever…it won’t matter”.  Of course, when editing the photos it bugged me to death and I wished I had changed it.

The solution?  Photoshop’s “Replace Color” adjustment.  I used the tutorial linked below as a starting point to learn about it and experimented from there.  Other than choosing the new color, the key setting for me was the “fuzziness”.  This determines how aggressive the automatic selection is.  What I found is that because of the variation in saturation throughout the shirt I had to slide the fuzziness way up which causes other parts of the image to also be selected (trying to automatically select the shirt’s colors reveals how much variation is really there).  I thought the checkbox for ‘Localized Color Clusters” (not shown in the tutorial but exists in CS5 at least) would help minimize the selection but I didn’t see a lot of difference once the the fuzziness was increased much. I also used the +/- eye droppers to add/subtract from the selection. Finally I needed a bit of manual masking to only change the shirt and not other areas of the image.  Something which is more solid in color would far easier to use this tool with.  The resulting photo is above — a 5-minute edit.  I will probably do another version and use a color picked from someone else’s shirt so that it matches even better with the rest of us.  When I look at the new image I kind of think it doesn’t look right because *I* know that I made the edit but in my brief survey of people who didn’t know about it, not a single person noticed anything.

Here’s the link to the tutorial I started with.

December 9, 2011 | Categories: Austin, Family, Misc, Photography, Processing, Technique, texas | Tags: 2011, austin, baby, brother, child, color, couple, cs5, dad, daughter, Family, father, group, infant, mom, mother, photoshop, portrait, replace color adjustment, sibling, sister, son, son-in-law, texas, thanksgiving, tx | 2 Comments