Turning white feathers black...? Help!

[mandjg19]

Hi there,
I have been trying desperately to change a feather boa from white to black in Photoshop, but it does not look realistic no matter what I do! Tried everything - selecting using the pen tool, refining edges, layers, hue/saturation etc etc. There must be a way to make them black and look realistic?!
This is the pic I am working with.

 

[iDad]

just a suggestion, try selecting the face the best you can, then inverse the selection then inverse the color that may get most of it where you want it

 

[mandjg19]

Thanks for the tip. I actually tried that. The problem is when I inverse it, it does not look natural - the feathers look odd :/

 

[Hoogle]

Not sure if this is helpful to you


will need tweaking a bit I went into the channels pallet copied the green channel inverted it control + click the preview icon then Select > inverse enable the Rgb channel again go back to the layers view edit Paste. ok looks weird now but select the skin tones from layer below select inverse click back on the inverted green channel layer and apply a layer mask. put a slight feather on the layer mask and use the burn tool on some of the edges.

 

[Hoogle]

as you can see it does need tweaking

 

[ibclare]

You have picked a very difficult image to work with mandjg. BTW, welcome to the forum. It is much like selecting hair but in the inverse. Could work to try some of those extraction techniques. Hoogle's solution goes a long way toward selecting. If you try this technique, once you apply the layer mask, you could try using the smudge tool and pardon this suggestion, but you might want to download some feather brushes and restore the edges that way. :mrgreen:

 

[Sierraccr]

Selecting hair/feather/fur is tough to do without losing the detail. It can be done - it just takes time.

I did a quick selection myself and my results were similar to Hoogle's. However, it you isolated portions of the edge with the lasso and zoomed in you could make a good job of it, I think. It would definitely be a great exercise to practice precise selection!

 

[ibclare]

Mine were similar too sierra and I used a different technique. I did use channels to make a selection of the face and copied that to the top layer. Then I made a white BG layer and set the second or original layer to difference.

Still had the uneven feathering and I tried refine mask, going back to channels and painting in overlay, reducing my levels adjustment, playing with curves instead, copied the channels layer and set it to multiply; I think that's it. This is a difficult image because there is little contrast between the skin and the feathers.

But one thing I didn't think of till now is: what if you increased the contrast for the whole image (retaining an original layer), then did a channels selection and go from there? Nope, not really much different than doing it after going into channels I guess. I think this just requires a good deal of manual work. Anybody has a better solution, please post it!

Maybe we should make this one of the "Challenges."

 

[Sierraccr]

The best way I've found in this type of situation is to desaturate a copy and then use that to play with. In some ways this is more difficult than hair because the feathers are symmetrical. You can't decide that certain portions can be left out, like you can with hair.

I might play with it a bit more after work today. It's an interesting challenge, mandjg19. Thanks for bringing it to us!!

 

[ibclare]

I took off from Hoog's psd. All I did was add feather brushes. I think we have all spent enough time on this thread, especially given that we're working with such a low res image. But it was an interesting exercise for me. I wonder how mandjg is doing, considering we haven't heard from him in over 24 hrs. Hope he found what he needed.