Photoshop Basics: Colour Range Tool

The Photoshop Colour Range Selection Tool used to isolate part of an image based on colour.

I’ve just uploaded a new video to my YouTube channel:

OK, so I’ve made a tentative start on my new Photoshop video tutorials and I thought I’d upload this Colour Range Selection Tool Basics one to my Tube of Me channel – just so that everyone can see what the Fuzziness, Localised Colour Clusters and Range “do-hickies” actually do for your workflow process!

The colour range selection tool can be used for many different purposes within Photoshop where you want to make a selection based on Colour/Hue as opposed to a selection based on luminosity.

In this video I use it to effect a colour change to a specific object within an image; but in the previous video post I used it to ‘remove’ a black background.

But both cases amount to the same thing if you think about it logically – it’s just a way of ISOLATING pixels in an image based on their colour range.

Overall, this is a bit of a “quick ‘n dirty” way of doing the job, and I could do a little extra brush work inside the mask to tidy things up that little bit more!

But now you know how the tool itself works.

A purer way of changing localised colour involves a very different method – see these other videos on my channel:

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Simple Masking in Photoshop – The Liquid Chocolate Shots

Masking in Photoshop is what the software was built for, and yet so many Photoshop users are unfamiliar or just downright confused by the concept that they never use the technique.

Mask mastery will transform the way you work with Photoshop!

Take these shots for instance:

Milk and Liquid Chocolate Splash

Liquid Milk and White Chocolate splash together in an abstract isolated on white background

Wanting a shot to look like liquid chocolate and cream on a black or white background is all well and good, but producing it can be either as simple or hard as you care to make it.

Trying to get a pure white background ‘in camera’ is problematic to say the least, and chucking hot melted chocolate around if fraught with its own set of problems!

Shooting on a dark or black background is easier because it demands LESS lighting.

Masking in Photoshop will allow us to isolate the subject and switch out the background.

Now for the ‘chocolate bit’ – we could substitute it with brown emulsion paint – but have you seen the bloody price of it?!

Cheap trade white emulsion comes by the gallon at less than the price of a litre of the right coloured paint; and masking in Photoshop + a flat colour layer with a clipping mask put in the right blend mode will turn white paint into liquid chocolate every time!

A tweak with the Greg Benz Lumenzia plugin will finish the shot in Photoshop:

SSChoc A final tweak in Lightroom and the whole process takes from the RAW shot on the left to the finished image on the right.

The key to a good mask in Photoshop is ALWAYS good, accurate pixel selection, and you’d be surprised just how simple it is.

Watch the video on my YouTube channel; I use the Colour Range tool to make a simple selection of the background, and a quick adjustment of the mask edge Smart Radius and Edge Contrast in order to obtain the perfect Photoshop mask for the job:

Like everything else in digital photography, when you know what you can do in post processing, it changes the way you shoot – hence I know I can make the shot with white paint on a black background!

Useful Links:

Greg B’s Lumenzia Plugin for Photoshop – get it HERE – you can’t afford NOT to have it in your arsenal of Photoshop tools.

UPDATE June 2018: Greg Benz (the plugin author) has launched a comprehensive Lumenzia training course – see my post here for more information.

Masking in Photoshop – you mustn’t let the concept frighten or intimidate you! It’s critical that you understand it if you want to get the very best from your images; and it’s a vast subject simply because there are many types of mask, and even more ways by which to go about producing them.

It’s a topic that no one ever stops learning about – nope, not even yours truly! But in order to explore it to the full you need to understand all the basic concepts AND how to cut through all the bullshit that pervades the internet about it – stick with me on this folks and hang on for the ride!

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