- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
Before we had Point Color (which is a super-fast and easy way to change the color of an object in your image), we used to use one of the other masking tools: Color Range. While it worked pretty well for changing the color of something, or making its color brighter or darker, it doesn’t compare to how easy the Point Color feature makes the process. Here how it works, in tandem with the Objects tool:
Step One:
Here’s our original image, and in this case, we want to adjust the color of the door so it contrasts with the windows and the accents. We’ll start by masking the door, so click on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram) to reveal the Add New Mask panel with the masking tools, and then click on Objects (as shown here, bottom left). In the Select Objects panel, choose Rectangle Select mode (instead of the default choice of the brush), and then click-and-drag out a selection around the door (as shown here).
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Step Two:
Dragging out that selection with the Objects tool does a great job of just masking the door, as shown here, where the masked door appears in a red tint to let you know what it selected.
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Step Three:
To change the color of the masked door, scroll down to the Point Color panel (seen here). The first step is to click on the Sample Point Color tool (the eyedropper) to activate it, and then click it in a blue area of the door to sample that color. You’ll see a white circle with a black dot appear inside a color gradient ramp in the panel, and that dot represents the original blue color. To change the color, click on that circle and drag it to another location (as shown here, where I dragged it over to a purple hue). The circle you’re dragging is a hollow white circle, and the black dot showing where the original color lives in the gradient remains right where it was. So, this gradient ramp lets you choose the hue (the color), and the saturation (more vivid, saturated colors are toward the top; more pastel, less saturated colors are near the bottom). The blue bar on the right side of the panel controls the brightness (luminosity) of the color. The bar directly below the gradient ramp shows the original color on the left, and the new color on the right.
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Step Four:
Another way of choosing a new color is to use the sliders: Hue Shift changes the color (like dragging the circle in the gradient side to side), Sat. Shift changes the saturation (like dragging the circle up/down), Lum. Shift changes the brightness (like dragging the circle in the bar on the right up/down), and Variance controls how wide or narrow your color selection is. The Range slider helps you control how many colors near the one you originally clicked on with the eyedropper get included in your color change. To expand the number of colors, drag the Range slider to the right, or to the left to reduce to them. If you click the left-facing triangle to the right of the Range slider, it breaks the Range colors down into three sliders for more precise editing. Here, I dragged the circle over toward cyan, changing the hue and saturation, so now the bar under the gradient shows the original blue and this new cyan-like color.
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