Inspiring

Answered

Trying to change color of selected object: What am I missing?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
July 31, 2018
4 replies
13983 views

I'm trying to change the color of a round object. Eventually I want to learn how to copy the color from another photo, but to begin with, I just want to manually adjust the color. I used the Quick Selection tool to select the object. I'm using PSE 18, but used the following instructions from the "The Photoshop Elements 15 Book for Digital Photographers"; it seems simple:

Now let’s make an adjustment and you’ll see that your adjustment will only affect your selected area. Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the top of the Layers palette, and choose Hue/Saturation from the pop-up menu. In the Hue/Saturation adjustments palette, drag the Hue slider to the left to change the color of the tiles to a green color. Notice how just the color of the tiles is changing and nothing else in the image? This is why selections are so important—they are how you tell Elements you only want to adjust a specific area.

But when I do that, the color of the object doesn't change. I can see that an extremely tiny area on or outside the edge of the selection is changing color, but nothing else. As an experiment, I used the rectangular selection tool to select the object and surrounding pixels. In that case, the area outside the object change color when I moved the Hue slider. So has something changed from PSE 15 to PSE 18, or did the author omit a step?

color change

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Correct answer hatstead

Try this:

Open the picture file
Activate the Magic wand tool. On the tool's option bar set tolerance=10, and check "contiguous." Left click in the center of the moon in order to select it.
Press CTRL+J to place the moon selection on its own layer.
Open a Hue/saturation adjustment layer above this, and press CTRL+G to group the top 2 layers. In the Adjustment layer dialog, check "colorize." Work the Hue/saturation/lightness sliders until you have the desired glow.

M

Mark_Sand

Inspiring

You can always cheat and download an orange moon from the internet (Google Image search yields hundreds).

Put it on a new layer, and resize/reposition to cover the old moon.

You can also download a grayscale moon and color it as you wish while still revealing the craters.

In this example I downloaded the grayscale moon, added a Solid Color fill layer of orange, and lowered the layer's Opacity to reveal the craters.

gfbugabooAuthor

Inspiring

I'm already cheating! I appreciate all the help. With Mark's method, I was able to just color the moon, as I set out to do. (And yes, it looks very fake.) With Hatstead's method, this time adjusting the Lightness slider, the entire photo was affected by the change in Hue, not just the moon. Although that wasn't what I was trying to do, I love the result:

My next project will be to learn how to adjust the moon by grafting on the color from another photo I took of the moon, in which the camera captured the orange color. But first I have three sets of photos to process. Thanks again.

M

Mark_Sand

Inspiring

gfbugaboo wrote
With Hatstead's method, this time adjusting the Lightness slider, the entire photo was affected by the change in Hue, not just the moon.

That would happen if the Hue/Saturation layer is not grouped with the moon layer. Is that the case?

M

Mark_Sand

Inspiring

gdbugaboo,

If the periphery of the entire moon is not selected the end result might be a tiny glow remaining from the glow around the moon, as in mine and hatstead's examples:

If this happens, you can apply a Free Transform to the moon layer and enlarge the moon a bit.

Here I increased the size to 105% on the Free Transform options bar:

M

Mark_Sand

Inspiring

hatstead,

I followed your instructions and and got the same result as gfbugaboo: no change to the moon color.

From my experience, a Hue/Saturation adjustment does not work on a white (or black) object.

I'm wondering how you got it to work.

Anyway, here is another method:

Ctrl-click the moon layer to select the moon.

Add a Solid Color adjustment layer and choose orange in the Color Picker.

If you later want to tweak the orange (make darker or lighter), double-click the adjustment layer to bring up the Color Picker again.

hatstead

Inspiring

Mark,

That's another way to do it.

The way I did it was to check the Colorize option, and work the 3 sliders, esp. lightness - to left of center.

M

Mark_Sand

Inspiring

hatstead,

Well, I learned something new today!

With the Colorize option and the object pure white (RGB 255,255,255), the Hue & Saturation sliders work only if the Lightness slider is left of center. Thanks for pointing this out.

Also, with the Colorize option and the object pure black (RGB 0,0,0), the Hue & Saturation sliders work only if the Lightness slider is right of center.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

What is the original color of the object?

Can you post an example photo?

gfbugabooAuthor

Inspiring

It is the moon. It is white in the photo, but a shade of orange to the eye.

hatsteadCorrect answer

Inspiring

Try this:

Open the picture file
Activate the Magic wand tool. On the tool's option bar set tolerance=10, and check "contiguous." Left click in the center of the moon in order to select it.
Press CTRL+J to place the moon selection on its own layer.
Open a Hue/saturation adjustment layer above this, and press CTRL+G to group the top 2 layers. In the Adjustment layer dialog, check "colorize." Work the Hue/saturation/lightness sliders until you have the desired glow.

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