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How do I match this colour?


Yaak

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I would like to make this black and white photo have the same colour and tone as this cyan photo so that they are identical. How can I do this in photoshop?
 
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The way I work, I would have found it easier to add the coloration before the image was converted to B&W, not after. The reason is that if you look at the areas (insects?) that wound up the brightest green in the B&W version, their tonal value is little different from the leaves around them. So, there is no way you are going to match the desired look by some global effect on the image like converting the B&W to a duotone or anything like that.

If you don't have the option to temporarily go back to the color version, then probably the easiest way to achieve the coloration is to use the gradient map tool, and set it to color only the darker and mid-tones, not the highlights. Then, select the areas you want bright green and manually up the saturation and brightness of these areas.

Screen shots of the layer stack I used, the Gradient Map Editor window, and my final result are attached below.

HTH,

Tom M
 

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  • BnW-tjm01-ps01a_green_gradient_map-01_698px_wide.jpg
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Hi Yaak -

It should get you quite close, but there is one major limitation to using an unmodified gradient map approach, and that is that it assigns one, and only one color to each brightness value. If, in your original program (...by the way, what program is that?) you have two different areas with the same brightness (ie, tonal value) but different colors, you will have to modify a straight gradient map approach.

For example, you will notice in my the first layer up from the bottom in my layer stack, I used a layer mask, and darkened a region near the upper right hand corner. The reason for this was that in this one area, the gradient map wanted to make the color more saturated than it was in your original. So, I used that layer mask to hold back application of the gradient map to that particular area.

You will also see that I had to dramatically increase the saturation of some areas near the center of the image above what the gradient map produced by itself for those areas.

Along those lines, there have been times when I've used two completely different gradient maps masked to adjust different areas of the image, eg, ground and sky in a landscape shot.

Does this answer your question?

Cheers,

Tom M
 

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