Getting rid of grays in the background

[Matt33432151x6sl]

I would like to replace the gray areas with white (above the diagonal, including the areas between leaves and branches). Is there an efficent way of doing this, maybe using blend modes? The branches and leaves should stay untouched. I'm using Photoshop 25.1 on Windows.

Thanks,
Matt

[kevin stohlmeyer]

@Matt33432151x6sl a real quick/rough demo but you can select your areas in various methods (color range, selection tools, etc) . I used the Magic Wand (sometimes old school is the best) with a tolerance setting of 20 - selected the areas and then apply a Levels adjustment layer masked to adjust the exposure turning the gray area white

Or you could simply paint a white layer over your transitional areas to cover them.

Either way - a blend mode would only help after you have added something to cover/adjust the areas.

[Matt33432151x6sl]

Thanks Kevin. I guess there is no other way than creating a mask for each gray area first. Since most branches are also gray and not in focus, a lot of fine tuning will be required (which I was hoping to avoid).

[kevin stohlmeyer]

@Matt33432151x6sl color range wasnt detailed enough and even adjusting selected too much - so I went low-tech with the Magic Wand. Using the tolerance settings, I could adjust each area while holding shift to keep adding to the selection in pieces worked best to give me a head start.

After that it is a lot of manual painting.

[Trevor.Dennis]

That's one hard selection.  Even after a lot of messing with it, I still can't see any sort of satisfactory result.  Are you donomg this to use the image, or to practice, or what?

If I had to use it, I'd rebuild it if I could, but even that is difficult because there is not enough detail to see what to build

[Matt33432151x6sl]

Trevor, this is the background of a picture I took a while ago; I removed the subject (a bird) to make the issue clearer. I'm getting back to photography and Photoshop again, and just wanted to give this another shot, hoping Photoshop has some enhacements that will make the processing easier. It's both a challenge and practice.
As you said it is a tough selection, but I like the progress you made on it. Rebuilding the background is also an option. I will keep experimenting. Thanks a lot.