Preserved Topic: Color changing

Hi everyone.

I have a question with which I'm hoping some of you PS gurus can help me. I need to change the color of a logo I've crafted. The original design was done on white background with black lettering. I probably should have used a transparent background, but that is beside the point. In any case, I need to change the color of the design from black to red. Is there a tool with which to do this without resorting to magic selection > fill foreground color ?

I've seen this technique used in catalogs where you'll see a picture of a tee shirt that's white, then four smaller pictures showing the same tee shirt with the same shading, etc, in four other colors. Since the design wasn't done in vector imaging, I have to deal with the gray feathering from the black blending into the white.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

-alms

There are several ways to do this, which one is the best depends on what your logo look like, and how much the white and black are merging into each other.

The easiet is probably just to use hue/saturation and click the "colorize". This will work particularly well if the new red colour is a rather light shade. Just increase the lightness, and then move the other sliders till you get the colour you wish. You might find this easier to do also, if you first use the curves to change the black to a grey shade.

Another way that might work well is to use the selective colour adjustment and then choose to adjust the black colour range. To get red you will then need to lower the value for cyan.

You might also be able to get a fairly good selection by using the colour range for selecting the area. Probably much better than you get with the magic tool.

hue/saturation won't work on black; there's no hue nor saturation. doesn't work on white, either--no hue, nor saturation.

you're going to have to remove the background by hand, with the lasso, with the pen tool (your best bet) or the image > extract command. either way, there's no easy fix.

It might not be that bleak. Make the the foreground color the red you want. Instead of alt/option delete to fill with the foreground color, use shift delete. In the dialog that follows, select foreground color set to LIGHTEN. This won't affect the white obviously, but will change the black, since any color will be lighter than black.

This assumes the logo is a solid black. If it's shaded this might not work.

Alternative: create a new layer set to lighten blend mode. Fill with the red color. Should do just the same thing.

Write back if you've still got problems.

'Nother thought. If your design really is black on white, you have the perfect basis for an alpha channel. Is it in a color mode now? If not, convert to RGB or CMYK, duplicate one of the channels (in RGB they should be identical; in CMYK just don't choose the Black). You'll need to invert this channel to be white on black. Now you have a perfect selection, including the antialiassing. Make a new layer, load this channel, fill with anything you please. Easy!

Twitch, your comment made me unsure, so I even created a little picture to test. Using the hue/saturation DOES work, but like I said, you need to increase the lightness if you want to be able to change what is really black.Since the background is already white, that will not not be any problem. The only problem with this approach might be to get the exact right hue of red...
I still think that would be the easist way to do it. Using the setting
hue:0, saturation:100, lightness:+50 will make everything that was black a nice bright red colour.

I was experimenting...and I found a feature called 'remove white matte' under the layers menu. This seems like it should remove the white background and return the edges back to semi-transparent, but it does nothing. Does anyone know what this feature is used for?

mbridge: when you try to select, copy and paste something that was previously on a white background, antialiasing often picks up a white fringe from the previous background. Remove white matte won't do anything unless the thing you try applying it to is on a transparent layer (and maybe still selected - I haven't used it for a while). Does that make sense? I mean, it won't do anything when applied to a flattened image. What it does is look for white fringe around the edges and replace it by pushing pixels from close to the edges out. I think you can specify how far into the selection it reaches.

Remove black matte does the same thing with a black fringe froma black previous background. These are both sometimes helpful, but never seem to be helpful enough when you need 'em.

The method that Steve suggested using a new layer in the lighten mode was not only the quickest but also the most thoroughly effective. Simple, fast, complete. Cool!

Okay, here's a way which might work but it'll depend on your colors. Basically, it will change every black pixel to whatever pixel you want.

First, open the picture you have in Photoshop, then go to image->mode menu and change the image to indexed color mode.
When the dialog box comes up, just use [Adaptive] [8/bits per pixel] [256 colors] [best dithering mode]
When that's done, go to the same menu, and choose color table.
Select custom.
Then select the black pixels and change the color to red.
You can select a whole row of pixels, and then you'll be asked to choose the beginning and ending colors and PS will use set up a range of pixels between the two colors you picked.

Now, I'm assuming your logo isn't too complicated, otherwise you'll have to do a bit of tweaking with the palette to get it right. And if you mess up, just ctrl-z and try again.

Enjoy!

Hey, here's an example of the technique I just posted. It's quick and dirty, and I just used the pre-made blackbody palette to give you an idea of how it works.
Sorry about the download time guys.

Before


After

I won't say what the bottom one looks like...

Quickest method I can think of:

- Make sure the image is in RGB mode
- Image

Now I've never said I am a PS expert and this isn't great solution but if you create a new background layerin the color you want , place the old image on top and turn the old layer from NORMAL to SCREEN shouldn't that work? (only in this case because it is black)



Walking the Earth like Kane

[This message has been edited by bitdamaged (edited 03-22-2001).]

next time you may want to consider creating your logo in Adobe Illustrator then using the 'Place' command in Photoshop to bring in your logo to your .PSD. This is generally what I do and it makes for very easy color changes down the road....

Maybe it can helps!
talks about replacing color, a brief theory that i had never touch again, but i will! http://www.hamaquita.com/dibujandito/tips/canalesingles.htm