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Leo Laporte A technology journalist, author and broadcast personality. His specialties lie in computers, the Web, video games, digital music and consumer electronics. |
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Amber MacArthur An experienced Web content and usability strategist, Amber is also a tech journalist who specializes in Internet, software, and gadget trends and tips. |
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This segment will demonstrate how to use Photoshop to change wall colours in a photograph, thus saving the hassle and expense of painting a room over and over in an attempt to find an acceptable colour.
Painting a room is not fun.
Repainting it because you don’t like the colour you just painted it is even less fun.
If only there was a way you could take a photograph of the room and try several different colours out before buying a single drop of paint.
Wait! There is! Adjustment layers are a way of modifying an image, but in an infinitely adjustable way.
Start by taking a photo of the room you want to paint. Open it up in Photoshop, and under the Window menu, call up the Layers palette. At the bottom of the Layers palette, you’ll see a row of icons. Click on the one that looks like a circle, with one half light and one half dark. This is the Adjustment Layer icon, and from here you can add any type of adjustment layer. An Adjustment layer is like a filtering layer. It affects the pixels below it, but in a non-permanent, adjustable way. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, and in it’s dialogue box, check the colorize option. This will give you a monotone image, the colour of which you can control with it’s Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders. The Hue slider controls the colour of the image. The Saturation slider controls how intense the colour is (left makes the colour greyish and muted, while right makes it very intense and vibrant). The Lightness slider controls how light or dark the colour is.
Once you’ve checked the colorize box and you’re seeing the image in monotone, keep an eye on the wall colour and play with the sliders until you see a colour you like. Now, this is going to affect the whole image, but don’t worry, we’re going to limit the colour to only the wall in the next step.
When you’re happy with the colour, click OK,and you’ll see the adjustment layer appear above the image layer in the Layers palette. Notice the white rectangle that has appeared next to the adjustment layer’s icon? That’s a layer mask, and it’s purpose is to mask, or hide the effect of the adjustment layer. It’s important to remember that with any layer mask, black hides and white reveals, meaning that if the layer mask is filled with black, it will hide the effect of the adjustment layer, and if it’s filled with white (as it is now), it will reveal the effect. Make sure that the layer mask is selected by clicking on it’s icon in the Layers palette. Now, anywhere on your image that you don’t want the coloured effect to show, you can hide it’s effect by painting with a brush loaded with black paint. Give it a try. Choose a paintbrush, make sure you have black paint selected and start painting on any part of your image that you don’t want colourized. You’ll see the colour effect disappear, and the original colour of the image reappear. Now, all you have to do is paint over any part of the image that you don’t want coloured.
The great thing about Adjustment layers is that you can change them at any time. If you want to try some different colours on the wall, simply double click on the adjustment layer’s icon and the original dialogue box will appear, complete with the settings you originally used the create the current colour. You can now play with the sliders to create the colour you want on the walls, or to try several colours before finally picking one and buying the paint.
You can use this same technique to try several colours on your car before repainting it, or to see what your powder blue tuxedo would look like if it were more fuschia, or even chartreuse.
Good Luck, and have fun!
RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Adobe.com
PRODUCTS SHOWN
Adobe Photoshop CS2
ABOUT THE GUEST
For the past decade Greg has been working with digital images. Through his years of experience he has developed a distinct style of retouching people. His ability to seamlessly composite images from a variety of frames to create the ‘perfect shot’, has made him a sought after retoucher by commercial, advertising and fashion photographers. Some of his clients include Flare, Chatelaine, Clin d’Oeil. Greg has maintained long lasting working relationships with many established fashion photographers and up and coming make-up artists and stylists. His photographic and digital talents have combined in CD covers and Dance Posters, where he has done the photography, retouching and layout, taking the project from start to final press.
