TUTORIAL | COLOR RANGE (Photoshop CS4)
I did some quick google research and i'm almost positive that this is translatable to Photoshop CS2-CS5.
If not, my apologies. However, I do know it's NOT available in Elements.
So, I don't know how many people are going to benefit from this tutorial...but I figured it's something I would want to know if I ever needed it. This tutorial deals more with making your own textures (or ~graphic extras~ if you prefer). You can make these in a lot of ways. Scanning, taking pictures, etc. When I use these textures, I usually set them to screen or multiply depending on the look i'm trying to achieve. But sometimes that's hard to do, like in this case:
I took this picture when the evening was setting in. Since the light was so low there wasn't a lot of contrast between the tree and the sky.
Because of that, if I just greyscale the image, it looks like this:
So..pretty much useless if I set to multiply or screen, since the values of the sky and tree are still too close. So i'm about to show you an extremely easy way to select only certain parts of an image without masking, magic-wand tooling or hand selecting.
In this case it will be a tree (even the little wispy branches!).
First, return your foreground and background colors to their defaults: black foreground, white background. Hitting the "d" key (i'm on a mac, I don't know if it will work on PC) is the shortcut for this.
Select ➞ Color Range
Move the slider back and forth until you're happy with the selection.
When you press OK, everything that was white in the Color Range dialogue box is now selected. In this particular image, that means the tree.
Select ➞ Inverse so the selection ants invert and select everything BUT the tree. Now you can hit the delete key (or any method of your choosing that will make the background white). This leaves the background white. So now we have a dark tree on a white background with no extraneous pixels floating around.
Now, you can stop here and use this as your texture (set to multiply/darken, etc.) or you can go a step further and flatten your image and inverse it (Command + I) so the tree is white and the background is black.
This makes for an easy texture you can set to screen/lighten, like this:
Okay, i'm done now. I hope this helps at least somebody! lol :)
I took a photoshop class this semester...so if anyone wants any simple tutorials on how to do stuff, like masking, saving channel selections, shortcuts, etc.. just ask! I'd be more than happy to make tutorials. It's pretty basic stuff but it's stuff I didn't learn until I actually took a class.