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.

[Merlin3]

Hi,

I can add my two pennuth on selecting edges, I am no expert but been doing such 40 years, perhaps in a wrong way !

Extensis used to make add ons for photoshop I recall that managed to make a soft edge that cleverly took out the adjacent colour so no halos existed, also could deal with selection of hair. I seemed to think such clever tools were then added by Adobe themselves. Being a CS6 user I have to do it the old way,

1. paste the T shirt picture into the recipient picture and scale it to size.

2. make the eraser have the same soft edge as the edges of objects in the receiving picture. 

3. duplicate the image and save as pre trimmed,turn it off, just incase you goof !

4. erase round the edge with edge of circle of the eraser  half way across the fade edge. (caps lock toggles gunsight/circle). Tip.. I prefer to paint with black in quick mask mode, hit Q for quick mask, black becomes red as you paint, gives the chance to filter > gaussian blur that quick mask if need be, and a good visual on where you are. hit Q again and save the selection etc. Finish off in Channels. Tip. when in channels and the b/w image, my saying is, exit channels via top RGB layer, (i.e. click on top layer, before going back to layers.)

5. delete using that selection

6. with eraser nibble away any darker halo. I feel there is no perfect auto tool, nothing like the manual touch.

7. loss of a few pixels wont show on a big item.

I wish when altering brush size that the width of the soft edge remained constant, one is always after same feather width when painting into small areas yet Adobe want to make the edge feather less as you choose a lesser diameter. so end up with harder edges. Does my head in ! maybe CC has now overcome that failing, has it ?

Also one needs to match the grain in the image to the recipient image, ( I have started a thread on that)

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/what-method-match-noise-in-existing-p...

as well as the degree of blur. and direction of light.

As for altering colours, I tend to use HSL as an adjustment layer tick box to apply to previous layer. sometimes I end up using colorise. tick box as well in that interface for HSL. also Colour balance.

No doubt others have better ways. I am keen to know of such !

Merlin