How apply RGB color?

[56_kruiser]

I have a shade in a photo I want to duplicate in another. One post I found somewhere said to use the Info Window, hold mouse over spot you want to duplicate, and get the RGB numbers. Then Use the Channel Mixer and apply the numbers.

Problem is, the RGB colors from the Info Window are not presented in percentage of RGB, whereas the Channel Mixer uses percentages.

So, for example, my RGB may be 239/123/57. I can't figure out how to apply that.

I tried dividing it to get a %. IN the above example, I would divide 239 by 255, and use that as the % for red. But that doesn't come close.

Any thoughts?

 

[ALB68]

Hi 56_kruiser
It would be helpful if you would post the photos your working with. The gurus respond to images and will help.

 

[56_kruiser]

Sure. I want to apply the colors that are on this car:




To this car:



I've been able to approximate it, but it's not really very good.

 

[56_kruiser]

Here is what I've gotten, which is a pretty poor likeness.

 

[ALB68]

Couple of ways I might go about this. Collect your color from Orange. With both images open at the same time, sample the color you want to apply to the red car. You need to have your color sampler set above the point sample size..5 x 5 etc maybe more. Get your RGB numbers from there and transfer over to your red car image. Set your foreground to that color. Then add a layer. Fill that layer with the foreground color. Apply a layer mask, enter Ctrl I to invert it. Then paint with white on the mask to reveal the color. You can vary the opacity of the brush, the layer and try some different layer blends.
You can try the color replacement brush, but the top part of that car is more like a gradient and to me that would not be the best. I'm sure there will be others chime in here that are much better than me, but this will work up

By the way, not a bad job you have done either. I like it but your obviously not satisfied with it, so press on,

 

[SCTRWD]

Use Match Color:

​

 

[Tom Mann]

Since SCTRWD already nicely demo'ed "match color" (ie, the native PS tool), I thought I would try one of the commercial tools that I haven't yet had a chance to play with, namely, the "match" tool that comes as part of Tiffen DFX v3.

It was very easy to set up and get a reasonable approximation of the color. The only problem was that while rushing to get this demo done, I messed up royally and applied the orange (ie, top) color from the source image to the entire paint job on the recipient image. Obviously, I should have applied it only to the top of the recipient image and applied the bottom color (ie, the yellow-tan) from the source image to the bottom of the recipient image. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go back at the moment and correct this, but at least you get the idea of how well it works if u just ignore the bottom of the car :-( .

Cheers,

Tom M

PS - Another color matching plugin you should be looking at is "recolorST" by FoksMarx. It's quite complicated but once you get it to go, it works wonderfully. I'll try to demo it tmmrw.

 

[56_kruiser]

Thanks. I appreciate the help.

 

[Tom Mann]

I had a minute to fix the error I made yesterday (ie, applying orange to the whole car, not just the top part of the paint job).

I used exactly the same technique as yesterday (ie, the "match" tool in Tiffen DFX), this time limiting the areas of interest in the two cars to the bottom half. (BTW, while I'm thinking of it, pls. excuse the lousy masking job. I really didn't have time to devote to improving the masking).

Anyway, the interesting thing was that after I ran Tiffen DFX, the replaced yellows did not look very good, so I did tweak at area a bit with some simple levels and Vibr/Sat adjustments. I'm pretty sure that the reason for this was the difference in lighting between the two vehicles, particularly, the stronger directionality of light incident on the source vehicle.

Also, to demonstrate that this was a fairly good match, I superimposed a copy of the new paint (on the recipient vehicle) on top of the image of the source vehicle.

One final comment: When doing work like this, I sometimes find it easier to regard the task like I would a re-coloration of a B&W print, and use techniques that I would use for those types of jobs rather than trying to use "match colors" or "replace colors" tools. There have been lots of discussion of re-coloration on this forum in the past year. Everyone has their own favorite methods, but a lot of us use a Hue/Sat adjustment layer with the "colorize" box checked, and then optimize each area with its own (highly specific) Hue/Sat adjustment layer.

T




...and, as explained in the body of the message ...