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

This opens the dialog “Color Range” (1). 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, you the example of the opened image.

You can change the display of this example as “Selection” or ” Image” (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 option “Sampled Colors” is selected, which allows us to 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 for selecting colors or 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 the “Sampled Colors” option.  This way you have much more control over what colors you want to delete and what you want to add.

At the bottom of the dialog box, we have “Selection Preview” (4). Clicking on the downward pointing arrow next to this box, gives you different 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 set in the dropper. You can always adjust this, by closing the “Color Range” window, selecting the dropper in the toolbar and changing 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 you do not want to select all, then choose the option “Localized Color Clusters” (8), and reduce the value of the “Color Range”.
Change the “Fuzziness” to change the tolerance of the pixels to select and the value of the pixel clicked must comply with this.
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 possible now.

Another tip.
If you have selected too much, you get a different selection tool and thus remove the superfluous selection.
You need to know how to do that.

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