Change color of an earring

[greenmorpher]

I have a photograph of a girl with earrings that don't match her dress.

How do I substitute the color of the dress (a blue) for the base color of the earring (a green)?

Best regards

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com

[bkh]

I have a photograph of a girl with earrings that don't match her dress.

How do I substitute the color of the dress (a blue) for the base color of the earring (a green)?

Difficult to say without knowing the picture.
I'd probably try a (new, transparent) layer in mode "colour" (or maybe hue, but probably there will be little difference), then pick the colour of the earrings and paint over the dress using that colour. Maybe it's possible to create a mask for the dress and paint using that mask – if that works, you can save yourself a lot of detail work.

Alternatively, you can also try the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer– pick the colour of the dress as the colour range and adjust the hue slider until the dress matches the earrings. You may have to fiddle with the colour range sliders, and of course, you'll have to mask out other blue objects.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[greenmorpher]

I have a photograph of a girl with earrings that don't match her dress.

How do I substitute the color of the dress (a blue) for the base color of the earring (a green)?

Difficult to say without knowing the picture.
I'd probably try a (new, transparent) layer in mode "colour" (or maybe hue, but probably there will be little difference...

Hey, Burkhardt, you got it in one, mate. Many thanks. I just couldn't get my head around it. I knew I had to use an adjustment layer, but then I just couldn't ...

let's not talk about the problems of aging!

I'll post the pic tomorrow.

Cheers, geoff

[greenmorpher]

Here's the pic. We're advertising the hair extensions. I'll be doing another shoot on Monday. The girl is a first time model and this was the first time I'd photographed her (and I haven't quite a few years) so we were all a bit stiff and preoccupied with just getting some pictures! We just didn’t notice the earrings when she changed tops.

Anyway, all's well that ends well.

In the end, working in PLD format, I didn’t use an adjustment layer, I outlined the earrings individually with a vector, went Tool > Lasso > Convert layer to lasso, copied the earrings and pasted them in as new layers. Then I made a hue adjustment to change the color from green to blue. I tried tweaking brightness and saturation to even out the coloring of the two earrings -- the left (her left) one which you might think should be brighter because it is on her sunny side, in fact was darker. That tweaking didn’t satisfy me, so I did final tweaking in Tool > Histogram correction.

Saved it all in PLD against possible further adjustment, then I reduced everything to the background and saved as a JPEG at 100% high quality to use in another program where I was making up the packaging.

Oh -- I cleaned up her eyes; sheh ad worked late the night before in her "day" job as a waitress and she reacted a bit to the make-up so the whites of her eyes were pretty red. I overdid the correction on purpose. Selected them using the same technique as for the earrings, pasted them in as layers, then applied the brightening brush at fairly low power but a number of times. I also used the finger tool to get rid of some darker areas that still remained and to shape things up a bit.

Naturally, I used the blemish correction brush to remove a few blemishes, particularly along the border between the bright and dark areas on her face.

Picture was taken with an Olympus E-PL3, f1.8 45mm lens (which is brutally sharp), with an Oly FL50 flash with diffuser on the camera to fill the shadow areas and leave the sunlight as highlight and hair light. This was something of an emergency lighting set up -- I had in available as a back-up, but I was planning to work with two flashes in an improvised studio with an umbrella providing the main light and a direct flash with a little snoot providing the hair light. But the second flash -- a small Metz which has been good to me for a couple of years -- dropped dead when I was doing salon shots of the preparation. Buggerit!!!

So out to the verandah we went and by great good luck, the sun had just moved far enough cross the sky to give us the top light.

Of course -- here in the tropics of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in the dry season, we can bank on the sun shining all day most days!

So Burkhardt, thanks once again for pointing me in the right direction.

Cheers, geoff

[bkh]

Very well done! Glad it worked for you. (Probably you've noticed that I was under the assumption that you wanted to change the colour of the dress, which would have been a much harder challenge. )

It must be great to be able to work in PNG (esp. during the Australian winter) – summer is due here in Germany, but we're still waiting for a bit of sunshine and temperatures rising above 20 degs (Centigrade …).

Cheers

Burkhard.

[greenmorpher]

Thanks, Burkhardt -- yes, I did notice that you inverted the question, but that didn’t matter, the principal was the same. Regarding temperatures -- I was on Yahoo the other day and I'm registered as being in Mentone, Melbourne, Australia, so it automatically popped up with the temperature there. At 1pm local time, it was 11.2 C in Melbourne; 27 C in Port Moresby! I'll take Port Moresby every day!

I have a friend here who is German -- in fact, Wolfgang arrived in my old stamping ground of Bougainville just a few months after I left it in 1969 so we have a heap of friends and acquaintances in common, but we didn’t meet until a few years ago here in Port Moresby. He has worked in a range of stuff including running the botanical gardens; now he has his own company providing webmaster services and building sites by hand. He also drinks a lot of beer, but is lean and fit. Works like a demon and plays just as hard. And plans to die warm (or possibly not to die at all)!!!

Yes, it's great to be in Port Moresby and locating and photographing beautiful girls, the local life, and all. This girl is a waitress in a local restaurant; she was on door duty when I happened to walk past so I gave her a card and you see the result!

Cheers, geoff