Magic wand / flat colors breaking into multiple shades when adjusted

[gh30943181]

I'm working on comics pages that have been "flatted" -- that is, someone else has created a layer with flat colors over my line drawing. The edges are not anti-aliased. I use the magic wand to select each color, adjust it e.g. with Hue/Saturation, repeat until I'm happy with all the colors, then add shading on a separate layer.

This works fine initially, but the problem I'm having is that after I've adjusted the colors, if I go back and select a color again, sometimes it doesn't select the whole thing -- somehow the solid color I had before has broken up into two or more (visually similar but slightly different) shades, as if by dithering. Has anyone seen this problem? Thanks!

[barbara_a]

I haven't seen that problem before. It sounds like the magic wand may not be selecting all of the color area. It would be easier if each color was on a separate layer.

The magic wand has a tolerance setting. You could try increasing the toleraance so that more of the color is selected.

You could also try using the Quick Selection tool instead of the Magic Wand. The Quick Selection tool is a little different technique; don't click too close to the outer edge of the color.

[gh30943181]

Thanks! A little more info -- I'm aware of the tolerance setting. Initially I can select the whole color area using a MW tolerance of 1. After adjusting, I might need to bump it up to 3 to get the whole area. But sometimes that is a problem because I might have very similar colors and it will select those -- or in some cases *part* of them, as they may also be broken into multiple shades. (You'd think this wouldn't happen very often, but it is useful to differentiate, say, the same metal on a foreground/middle/background by using just slightly different colors. But those colors are frequently close enough that a tolerance of 3 will start picking them up.)

I maybe should've put "Hue/Saturation" in the subject line, because at this point I'm wondering if that particular adjustment could be doing something to break up the solid color? Another possibility is that when I save, the PSD compression is doing it. I'm pretty sure I've seen this behavior without closing and re-opening a file, which would seem to rule that out, but I'm not 100% sure.

The idea of breaking colors into layers is sound, but would slow the processing for each image significantly, and make it harder to find what I want later. (I wonder, is there a procedural way to break all colors into separate layers?)

[barbara_a]

Since it is not practical for you to put the color areas on separate layers, you could consider saving a selection of each color area as an alpha channel. That way, whenever you want to select a color area you can just Control (Mac) or Command (PC) Click on the alpha channel to quickly load the selection.

[jane-e]

"but would slow the processing for each image significantly, and make it harder to find what I want later"

Hi

That would only be true if you do not yet understand how to name layers, organize them into folders, and search for them in the layers panel. Auto-select for layers can be on or off, depending on what you are doing. You might want to take a little time to understand layers now, and then put each color on a separate layer, as suggested by Barbara.

Here are a few links to get started. If you get stuck, ask in a new thread.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/layer-basics.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qiytyr203g (Terry White)

https://members.kelbyone.com/course/terry-white-layers-for-beginners/ (paid site)

https://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/tag/layers

 Jane