I presume my question is basic but I have spent the last 2 hours trying almost every combination that seems relevant from help files and other threads here.
not sure about the color replace tool (haven’t worked with it much) but you can use the regular brush in "Color" mode (in the options) bar to colorize b&w pix.
alternately you can use selections and hue/saturation adjustment masks with the "colorize" box checked. this is one of the best ways to change colors that are either all black or all white, because the lightness slider allows you to apply color to these areas that the brush in color mode won’t be able to get at.
Dave,
The H/S adjustment worked, thank you.
The brush in colorize mode did not due to the lightness point you mentioned.
The effect of the H/S adjustment is what I expected of the colour replacement tool. It works like that in Corel’s Photo-paint. From reading the forum I gather the replacement tool is new in CS, can anyone tell me how it is supposed to work in Photoshop?
The color replacement tool is supposed to work the way the manual says it works.
And it does.
I had followed the manual… but just re-reading it noticed that it does not work on bitmaps, and of course I was trying to change colours in a bitmap.
Well, yeah – bitmaps only have two colors: black and white.
Err, no Chris, it is a 16 bit colour bitmap (Windows)
Slistress,
In Photoshop-speak, ‘Bitmap’ refers specifically to a bi-colour 1-bit image. Whenever you see ‘Bitmap’ in the User Guide or Help files, that’s what it refers to.
Thanks, another step on the learning path… but then we get back to the original point that the colour replacement tool does not appear to work?
There was a clue in an earlier reply by Dave Milbut whose suggestion "hue/saturation adjustment masks with the "colorize" box checked" provides a working alternative solution.
He also pointed out that this would work on parts that the "brush in color mode won’t be able to get at."
1. Why should there be anything the brush cannot get to?
2. When using the brush as suggested it paints the centre of the area flat grey and only the fringes green. So presumably the centre area is an example of something the brush cannot get too.
3. Trying the colour replacement tool it does colour the fringes green but leaves the center untouched.
The original is all shades of brown from dark to light. Having found a situation where the colour replacement tool will not work I really would appreciate some more information about ‘how’ it is supposed to work and what is going wrong in my case.
The original is a scan from an engraving of a map and I want to colourize trees, water and certain buildings etc. It is mostly completed now but I frequently work on this type of image and would appreciate more feedback.
Thanks for all so far.
1. Why should there be anything the brush cannot get to?
beacuse just changing the color (hue) of black is still black… you need the lightness slider in hue/sat to turn the black slighty grey so that you can SEE the color you’re changing to. otherwise you’re changing the color, yes, but you can’t see the change because luminocity (lightness, and i hope i’m using the correct terminology here) is at 0.
same for white. you can change the color, but it’s TOO bright for you to see. using the lightness slider and going down (towards gray from white) will allow you to see the color change, then you can use the saturation slider to increase or decrease the intensity of the selected color.
again, this really doesn’t answer you’re original question about the color replace tool, as i haven’t played with it much yet, but i hope it answers some questions about why black and white need to be tweaked a bit before color changes work on them.
Thanks Dave, presumably the colour replace works the same way as the brush, although the effect is slightly different. Hopefully someone from Adobe will help us out a bit more.
