How to replace color?

blitzkrieg79 said:

Hi guys,

Although I consider myself to be an experienced computer user I am starting to learn Adobe Photoshop and its secrets. I am using Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Anyway, please refer to the attached image. My question is, what is the fastest way to replace the color of an image so that the color changes but the reflections seen on the car stay there.

I tried using the Color Select Tool but it either is time consuming or am I missing something? There must be something more time efficient than this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Click to expand...

there are a number of ways to do this, MY prefered way is to draw a selection around the object using the Pen tool, saving the selection (double clicking in Path pallett...for future colour changes) then creating a new layer and simply filling the new area with colour (on the new layer NOT the original Pic layer) then playing with the modes (at the top of the layer palette...usually says "normal") usually "colour" gives the best results in maintaining the shadows and highlights

edit: the results are entirely dependant on the original image, for instance if you have a green car and want to make it red, overlaying red will not produce the desired colour...in an ideal world you should try and work with a silver car as it has both strong highlights and shadows, whereas a white car generally will have very weak highlights

After using the selection tool of your choice (along with quickmask mode if you want to) use an adjustment layer to preserve the original image. Use the Hue and Saturation or the Color Balance sliders to alter the colour. You might find the Color Balance sliders better, but play around to see which gives you the desired results.
As with all things Photoshop, this is only one of several possible methods.

Interesting problem. Here is my attempt (God knows I need to practice). It is not as dark as I would have liked it but it already starts to loose hi-lights at this shade.

Here's an in-depth tutorial that's actually for your exact question:

http://creativebits.org/photoshop/colorizing_cars

I go into the image menu and select hue and saturation.

I move the hue fader to desired color.

I then select the History Brush, zoom in, and color over anything that needs to match the original pic.

This takes me a few minutes at most

blitzkrieg, that is exactly what I used. Took all of a minute. No more. LAB color space is wonderful.

LAB is a great space for doing that. One thing about some of these methods that get overlooked, laying a down flat color (or Hue/Saturation then Colorize) will give the same color hue in the highlights and shadows. Most colors will be slightly warmer in the highlights and slightly cooler in the shadows. Like in the red car the highlights would move slightly to orange and the shadows slightly to purple. I sometimes will put an extra adjustment on top to get that color difference.

stridey said:

Here's an in-depth tutorial that's actually for your exact question:

http://creativebits.org/photoshop/colorizing_cars

Click to expand...

Or you could use the color replacement tool as someone commented at the URL above...
http://www.jdempsey.com/?p=195