Make the black part light gray in a black and white image

[Zucca]

 Hello Affinity Users

 I want to adjust the black trousers in the attached image to light gray

 What should i do?

 

 I wanted to use the selection brush to specify and adjust the black areas

 But even if I didn't select it, I thought it would be nice if there was a way to replace only the black color in the image with gray.

 I also didn't know how to recolor black to gray from a menu with lots of adjustments.

 (I thought recolor was appropriate, but it didn't work to black)

[GarryP]

In this particular case you can try a Selective Colour Adjustment, adjusting the Blacks and Neutrals, see attached video.
Probably not a ‘perfect’ result but you didn’t specify why you wanted to do what you asked for.

[ac-13]

I downloaded your image and did the following:

Convert to Greyscale

Add a Curves Adjustment layer - see screen shot- drag the left-hand bottom (Black) node about halfway up the left side

Set the Blend Mode of the Curves Adjustment to Negation

Use the Blend Ranges option on the Curves Adjustment layer - the cogwheel shown on the layers Panel beside the Blend Mode - and set these as per the second screen shot, with the Underlying Composition Ranges dragged down to zero (bottom) about 50% of the way along

Trousers are greyer than original, maybe not as light as you want though...

[NotMyFault]

Another method, another result.

If you want to align the trousers to the rest of the line drawing, leaving only the silhouette in dark.

• tried my best to avoid halos at the edges
• Used frequency separation to conserve some structure
• Used helper layers to create a mask (can be tweaked further) and an inverse of the black, used for blending
• invert-filters

 

zucca light trouser.afphoto

[jaedee]

Different approach similar results. 

 

Gary Ps approach appears to be more precise and simpler

 

Edited May 12, 2021 by jaedee
Reviewed previous member's post