Replacing greys/Blacks - photo/designer

[toth]

So the replacement color tool doesnt seem to work with greyscale for some weird reason. I need to make grey parts of a mainly black image darker.

Like this, trying to get the "tips" blacker/darker, without affecting the other parts. The magic selection brush does a bad job, so does the "select sampled color", the replace color-brush won't do it, and I can't find an adjustment that will do it. I remember the "replace color" function from my Photoshop Elements 11(!) did this easily. Just adjust feather and replace any shade of gray with any color of my liking(including black). There must be a quick way/filter I'm missing?

 

[toth]

I found I still had PS Elements 11 - this is after literally 10 seconds of adjustment of Enhance>Color>Replace Color

 

[kaffeeundsalz]

The Color Replacement Brush doesn't do what you think it does. It replaces color based on hue and leaves saturation unchanged. This is why nothing happens on grayscale images: There simply isn't any color information the tool can use. Saturation is zero for all pixels.

That said, I have no problem whatsoever to quickly select all the tips in the image using the Flood Select tool. I can then apply any color I want to the tips by adding a Recolor adjustment and change the settings to my likings. To mimic your result from the screenshot above, I simply lowered the saturation to 0% and tuned down the Lightness slider. Admittedly, I didn't manage to do it in 10 seconds, but in 50. I can even fine-tune the result further with Blend Options which let me control how strong I want the color change affect e.g. the shadows of the tips.

If you only want to darken certain parts of the image (without actually applying color to your selection), you don't even need the Recolor adjustment. Just use the Brightness/Contrast adjustment which is even simpler because it has less sliders.

 

[toth]

Thanks man! How did you get a good selection though? I'm struggling with either too much or too little selected. What's your tolerance setting - do you use several samples wit low tolerance or just one sample with high tolerance?

 

This is my best attempt, sampling all the shades I can without affecting the surrounding black:

[kaffeeundsalz]

Oh, okay – I should have been more specific with the selection part. I tried a few things and could get the best selection by:

- using the Magic Wand tool (Contiguous option off, Antialias option on) but instead of selecting the tips, I selected the background until I got a clean marching ants frame around the tips;
- then inverting the selection
- then putting the Freehand Selection tool (Polygonal type) in Intersect mode and roughly circle around the area with the tips to exclude anything outside the desired area.

There are probably easier ways to achieve this, but this was the first idea I came up with that resulted in a selection good enough to show you the actual recoloring.

Hope that helps!

[toth]

11 minutes ago, kaffeeundsalz said:

but instead of selecting the tips, I selected the background until I got a clean marching ants frame around the tips;
- then inverting the selection

 

Ah, clever! Thanks!