Help with color change on shirts

[Rick29674466ipj1]

Hi there!

For my graphics design work I often have to take the color of a shirt, or sweater on a portrait picture and then change it to match a different color as closely as possible.

Right now the way I do this is I start with the shirt in a white color, then I use the Object Selection tool, and then I use the quick selection tool to select or deselect area's so that I get the best selection.

Quite often this leads to an okay but not perfect selection, then I smooth the selection, and then usualy I expand the selection by one pixel. I then add a color fill layer, which I either set to multiply or linear burn.

This gets me the best result so far, the problem however is that the selection either falls a little bit short, leaving white halo's around the shirt, or it goes to far in other area's where it creates black lines around the color (I've added a screenshot where both are visible).

I then often have to spend a large amount of time using the remove tool to alleviate these black lines and white haloing, which is both very time consuming and also doesn't always look the best.

A second problem is that while the haloing and dark lines are much less if I use multiply on the color fill layer, multiply seems to not preserve the texture of the shirt properly, making the color fill look fake.

Linear burn preserves the underlying texture to a much better degree, but suffers much more from the haloing and dark edges in places where the selection isn't perfect.

I am very curious if anyone could explain to me a better and more time effective way to do this, and as a bonus: if there is some way to automate the process?

Thanks alot for your help!

[Myra Ferguson]

When you expand the selection by 1 pixel, you might also add feathering (Select > Modify > Feather...). You can determine the amount of feathering you want--try 2 pixels, and increase or decrease it based on the results. The feathering will diminish the amount of color being added to the shirt on the edges.

[Rick29674466ipj1]

Hi Myra,

Thank you, I've tried feather, but the problem is feather works on the whole selection, while in some area's the selection is too wide (causing dark rings) while in others not being wide enough (white halo). So feather solves the problem in one area but makes it worse in other parts of the picture.