Color Range

When you make a selection using the “Wand” tool, you make a selection based on color. But, you do not have much control anyway.

If you want to select on the basis of color, it is better if you use the “Color Range” under the menu item “Select” in the menu bar.

This opens the “Color Range” (1) dialog. What did you think?

As an example I opened a photo of a yellow car and want to change the color to the rose.

In the middle of the dialog box, it shows an example of the opened image.

You can change the display of this example by using “Selection” and “Image” boxes (2).

Default is set to “Selection”, which displays the picture in black / white, but personally I prefer the option “Image”, which displays the picture in color.

At the top of the dialog we have the “Select” box.

By default the “Sampled Colors” option is selected, which allows us use the pipettes (3) to choose colors in the image that we wish to select or deselect.

But when you click the downward pointing arrow, we have a number of preset options that we can select for colors and tones. For example, “Red”, “Yellow”, “High Lights” etc.

You would think in this case when you opt for the “Yellow”, Photoshop will make a sound selection. I do not think so and my preference is always for the “Sampled Colors” option.

This way you have much more control over what colors you want to delete and what you want to add.

Bottom of the dialog box, we have “Selection Preview” (4).

Clicking on the downward pointing arrow next to this box, gives you some other ways to preview your display.

Personally I choose to display “black matte” (5) or “Quick Mask”, but as I said this is a personal choice. If you work better in another view, no problem, this does nothing to what you want to select.

To select a color, click it in the image. The sample size that Photoshop uses for this is the one set for the dropper. You can always adjust this by closing the “Color Range” window and selecting the “eyedropper” tool in the toolbar and change this option in the “Sample Size” in the options bar.

Just the same as in the previous lesson.

If you want more color or add another color, simply select the eyedropper with the plus sign (6), and click again in the picture.

If you want to remove some color select the eyedropper with the minus sign (7) and click on the image.

If you have a photo where a certain color repeats several times and do not want to select all, then choose the “Localized color Custers” option (8) and you reduce the value of the “Range”.

In the “Fuzziness” box, change the tolerance of the pixels to select, to comply with the value of the pixel clicked.

Click the OK button when you finish the selection.

Then we open the panel, “Updates” (9) to change the color of the car.

This is now possible.

Another tip.
If you selected too much, you select a different selection tool and remove the superfluous area.

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