[SammyC]

A little background, as its getting warmer I'm getting dragged into that never ending DIY cycle. So, we're looking to update the colour of the walls in the lounge away from stark white to something a little more interesting.

Rather than buy 100 tester pots and then go for the first one I thought it would be a perfect job for photoshop, take a photo of the lounge and also of the Dulux colour card and using the magic of the colour replacement tool hey presto instant repainting!

Trouble is that the tool doesn't seem to take notice of the saturation, i.e. if I pick a deep red, painting the white walls results in them being a very light pink. What I think I need to be able to do it to tell PS, somehow, this deep red should map to that very light white.

Any ideas?

[stepheno]

My only "quick suggestion" is using the colour picker which gives almost an infinite number of shades. But I don't know how you would translate that into a practical device.

regards

[Matt]

Are you using:- Image> Adjustments> Replace Colour ?

If you are, you need to have both images open (the room and the colour swatch).



In these examples the image on the right should be regarded as the swatch.
Open the replace colour tool, select the colour in your image that you wish to replace (Shown here with the black click).
Your colour will now show as the selected colour.
Moving the fuzziness slider to the right widens the selection and includes
shades very close to the selected colour (this is shown by the white background in the preview window).




Now click on the result colour box, this will bring up the colour picker tool.
By clicking on the swatch colour, the colour should change on the
Colour picker tool and the original image.

HTH

[SammyC]

Sorry Matt but that doesn't seem to work for me, I think it may be due to the fact that I'm not replaceing a colour as such but shades of white.

The walls go grey and green when I try to replace them with a strong colour.

[Matt]

I see what you mean.

[SammyC]

Got around it now, not as easy as I would hope but I've added a saturation layer set to colorise with an appropriate mask.

Seems to work but a bit more manual than I wanted.

Oh well.

[CT]

PSP uses a slightly different setup for the Colour Replacement Tool. First you select the CR Tool, then select the Colour Picker, (the eye dropper thingy) and with the left mouse button select the colour you want to replace, and with the right mouse button the colour you want to replace it with. Then selecting the CR Tool again you paint over the areas where you need to replace the colour - the colour is replaced as you go. In practice you need to experiment constantly with the tolerance settings of the CR Tool.

It works very well when it's a simple one colour you're replacing, but in practice that's rarely the case with shadows and highlights all affecting the hue. I find a fair degree of often tedious manual work is usually unavoidable to get a good result.

Another option which may help is to just select an area with the freehand mask tool. Desaturate down to mono then apply the new colour with the Fill Tool. You'll need to adjust the opacity of the Fill Tool for best results.

[SammyC]

Yep, that's kinda what I did in the end.

[barrymoir]

there is a great program out there called colour mechanics, you can change the individual colour in an image, or increase the colour existing to diff shades, very easy to use, i have it and its fantastic. It might be worth a shot. its a plugin for cs too.