For a book cover, I'm making a cut-out of a bumblebee photo. See part of the photo below. The wings of the bumblebee are transparent, so they should show what's underneath them. The original background was greenish, but I would like to change that to the yellowish color of the book cover background. Of course the not-transparant part of the wings should stay black. In other words, I would like to change a range of green colors to a corresponding range of yellow colors (different shades of a color should change into matching changes of the other color). Any ideas?
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As I said, it was just a quick example, not necessarily the best option. You can adjust it in many ways, by changing the color (which includes hue, saturation, and lightness), the blending mode, or the selection method. I tried Select > Color Range to isolate the green parts between the wings, but it was a lot more challenging so I first went with a simple color overlay. And now I tried another variation:
1. Select the wing parts that are over the background.
2. With the selection active, add a
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There’s more than one way to do it, so the method below might not be the “best” one, but it was quick. The two wing parts over the background were selected using the Object Selection tool in lasso mode. That selection was copied to its own layer (Layer > New > Layer Via Copy). With that layer selected, a Color Overlay effect was added (Layer > Layer Style > Color Overlay), and the effect’s Blend Mode was set to Color, and the color itself was shifted so that the wings look more like the background.
As I said, it was just a quick example, not necessarily the best option. You can adjust it in many ways, by changing the color (which includes hue, saturation, and lightness), the blending mode, or the selection method. I tried Select > Color Range to isolate the green parts between the wings, but it was a lot more challenging so I first went with a simple color overlay. And now I tried another variation:
1. Select the wing parts that are over the background.
2. With the selection active, add a Solid Color fill layer. The wing selection becomes a mask for the new layer. My initial fill color is 50% black, but that doesn’t matter.
3. Double-click the solid color fill layer, and click the color sampler on the image background to set that as the fill color. Now the Solid Color fill layer matches the background.
4. Adjust the solid color fill layer blending mode, opacity, and color to get the balance between color and layer detail that you want. I used the Overlay blending mode that ended up at 68%.
Now, you might say, there’s still a lot of green in the wings, even when the layer matches the background. If there is no green in the actual wings, the green might be contamination from all that green ambient light clearly visible flooding in from the background. If the ambient light was more neutral, my guess is that the wing transparency would be more neutral. So I would not worry about the green in this sample image, unless this is the only picture you have and the green has to be removed. In that case, just correct the entire picture away from green.
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