Abrupt Color Changes

[Sark]

Hi Sally.

At first I thought your challenge would be quite straightforward, then I realised the original was the blue wood and rope version, not the other way round. Extracting the blue rope from the blue wood was always going to be a challenge (for any extracting tool). As it turned out it wasn’t too bad. First I made two separate extractions. One of just the rope, this needed a little reconstructing on some edges in PS. This was followed by an easier extraction of both the rope and wood together. Then I just used Hue and Sat in PS.

This all took about 15 minutes. The main problem is that the image, on close inspection, has some jpeg artefacts around the edges of the wood and rope (exactly where Knockout processes information). Also, my Wacom has died and I’m making selections with a mouse. Using Knockout’s Polygon selection mode helped here, but the closer you can get to the edges, the better the results, and a pen and tablet would speed things up here.

After the above method I tried a different approach. In PS I just used a Hue and Sat adjustment layer above the image, and using its mask, painted in the colour of the rope. I timed myself and this took just 4 minutes. I placed a duplicate of the original image above this and extracted its background using Knockout. A Hue and Sat adjustment layer was used on this duplicate. Its mask was controlled with an inverted selection from my rope layers Hue and Sat mask. This hid the rope. I could now alter the colour of just the wood. This took just 4 minutes again, both to extract and colour. So, 8 minutes total for the image shown. I’ve included the .psd to show more clearly what I did.

Just got to save up for a new Wacom now.

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.ph...98A80472C7390A

Sark