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'Replace Colour' - How? (Affinity Photo)


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  • 4 weeks later...

Just thought I'd chime in: I'm not a professional and I've never used Photoshop. I just like playing around with image-editing software. I already owned Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, but I bought Affinity Photo this weekend because it was 50% off. I've fiddled around with it and watched a lot of tutorial videos and the program seems fantastic. However, I also own Pixelmator Pro, which I bought over a year ago. I haven't used it a lot and it definitely now feels limited compared to Affinity Photo, especially because Pixelmator Pro doesn't have anything similar to Affinity Photo's adjustment-layer masking. However, Pixelmator Pro has a really simple Replace Color feature that works well. You first choose the color you want replaced from the color picker or by clicking on a color in the image. Then you do the same for the color you want as the replacement.

I've attached two screenshots.The woman's sweater was originally red, but I changed it to the color of the blue rectangle.

Original.png

Color_Replaced.png

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5 hours ago, skylamar said:

However, Pixelmator Pro has a really simple Replace Color feature that works well.

I also have Pixelmator Pro. Its color adjustment "ML Enhance" color replacement option relies on machine learning (thus ML in the name), in which the app was trained on thousands of photos to recognize objects somewhat like people do.

Personally, I find that it works reasonably well on some photos but like in your example, for many others the results tend to look unnatural, particularly along edges.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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R C-R, I agree that my example looks somewhat unnatural, but I didn't play around with it to get it to look more natural and I didn't try to refine the edges. I was just doing a quick example to show how the replace color feature works. The above example literally took me about a minute to do. I would think if Affinity Photo had a similar tool for replacing color that it would also have more options for fine-tuning.

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44 minutes ago, skylamar said:

R C-R, I agree that my example looks somewhat unnatural, but I didn't play around with it to get it to look more natural and I didn't try to refine the edges. I was just doing a quick example to show how the replace color feature works. The above example literally took me about a minute to do. I would think if Affinity Photo had a similar tool for replacing color that it would also have more options for fine-tuning.

I agree, a dedicated replace color tool would be really cool.

Still, this HSL menu way of replacing colors offers tons of control and doesn't take much longer unless you want it to. Even when showing my steps, it only took a few minutes:

https://youtu.be/2E2eonztYn4

There's two benefits that go along with using the HSL tool to do a color change.

  1. By doing it this way, you are masking by hue, not by color. This is an important distinction, because the overall color includes hue, saturation, and lightness (or value, depending on what model you want to use). As you can see on your example, the software that you are using masks by overall color. Because of that, it didn't select the shadow on her sweater, and that part is still red. For color replacement, using hue to guide your selection is important, and that's exactly what HSL allows you to do. 
  2. Additionally, by cranking up saturation or hue, you retain the relatively variability of saturation and hue (unless you clip the saturation). In other words, even after the color change, some pixels are still more saturated than others. Saturation on HSL naturally goes down as things get darker. Take a look on this image, which retains hue and saturation but has only 1 lightness value:

image.png.b0b16df5b71379a140da48e746b638da.png

So that's the other important thing. The software you are using is forcing the color change. It forces the same hue and saturation across the entire sweater. This is not how things are supposed to be done because, as we can see above, the shadow regions should have a different saturation than the lighter regions. This is another reason why you want to do it through HSL.

Still, this is just why the current method is superior quality. As far as speed, I would love to see a feature like you're describing.

Note: I didn't make her sweater that blue, although you could if you wanted (just crank up saturation a lot, and luminosity a bit). I just think that it's impossible to get a sweater the blue. If it is possible then I want one :o

Edited by HuniSenpai
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 3/24/2020 at 12:43 AM, skylamar said:

HuniSenpai, would love to see the video, but it's private so I couldn’t view it.

Sorry for the late reply. For some reason I failed to publish the video, hence it being private. It's unlisted now, if you still want to view it. Sorry about that!

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Hi there, new to affinity.

Trying to replace the colour from blue do black, I set foreground to RBG 000, paint the whole BG with brush replacement and upon checking the BG with the colour picker it is 006 or 001 or 666. It's never full 000. Why is that?

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On 4/23/2020 at 6:05 AM, kerberos said:

Hi there, new to affinity.

Trying to replace the colour from blue do black, I set foreground to RBG 000, paint the whole BG with brush replacement and upon checking the BG with the colour picker it is 006 or 001 or 666. It's never full 000. Why is that?

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, kerberos.

I'm not sure I understand what you're doing, but if you're using the Color Replacement Brush Tool, you might want to review the Help on how it operates. Here's the online version, which describes it this way (with my emphasis😞
 

Quote

The Colour Replacement Brush Tool takes a sample of the colour under the cursor when you begin to paint, and will replace all closely matching colours along the stroke with the current Primary colour. The targeted colour's hue will be replaced with the current Primary colour's hue, while retaining saturation and lightness values of the original pixels.

Does that explain what you're seeing?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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On 5/18/2016 at 9:46 AM, cwmbrancon said:

Hi There,

 

I've just moved over to Affinity from Photoshop.

 

There is a 'Replace Colour' function in Photoshop that I use all the time. Basically selecting a colour and then altering the sliders to change. 

 

I cannot see this function anywhere in Affinity!

 

Can anyone help please

 

Thanks

 

 

#StayingHome Recolour Brush and Change Colours Using Affinity Photo on iPad #WithMe


there we go...

 

 

iPad Mini 6.  256GB.

Publisher. Designer. Photo for Mac, PC & iOS 

@Affinity-Inspiration

 

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12 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, kerberos.

I'm not sure I understand what you're doing, but if you're using the Color Replacement Brush Tool, you might want to review the Help on how it operates. Here's the online version, which describes it this way (with my emphasis😞
 

Does that explain what you're seeing?

Based on your quote, take as example my last picture I attached as a screenshot, the colour is blue, the primary colour is red, but the resulted colour with the color replacement tool is somehow dark red -ish kind of colour? Is that correct or am I still missing the point of the tool?

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8 hours ago, kerberos said:

the colour is blue, the primary colour is red, but the resulted colour with the color replacement tool is somehow dark red -ish kind of colour? Is that correct or am I still missing the point of the tool?

That's the designed result of the tool. The tool should have been named Hue Replacement Brush because only the hue of the painted colour affects the target pixels.

This might help if you are unfamiliar with Hue Saturation and Lightness (HSL) model of colour: https://www.nixsensor.com/what-is-hsl-color/

 

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11 minutes ago, anon2 said:

That's the designed result of the tool. The tool should have been named Hue Replacement Brush because only the hue of the painted colour affects the target pixels.

This might help if you are unfamiliar with Hue Saturation and Lightness (HSL) model of colour: https://www.nixsensor.com/what-is-hsl-color/

 

if I use hue/saturation in Lightroom/PS, I can easily transform a blue colour into red. this tool looks to me something like a merge/overlay.

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18 minutes ago, kerberos said:

if I use hue/saturation in Lightroom/PS, I can easily transform a blue colour into red. this tool looks to me something like a merge/overlay.

You could add a new Pixel layer above the source image, set that new layer's blend mode to Colour, and then use the regular Paint Brush Tool to paint into that.

Edited by anon2
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On 5/18/2016 at 9:46 AM, cwmbrancon said:

Hi There,

 

I've just moved over to Affinity from Photoshop.

 

There is a 'Replace Colour' function in Photoshop that I use all the time. Basically selecting a colour and then altering the sliders to change. 

 

I cannot see this function anywhere in Affinity!

 

Can anyone help please

 

Thanks

 

 

Hers what you need... Simple.

 

 

iPad Mini 6.  256GB.

Publisher. Designer. Photo for Mac, PC & iOS 

@Affinity-Inspiration

 

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  • 3 months later...

I'm switching over from Gimp to Affinity and I too am frustrated by the lack of a quick, easy colour swap function. I wasn't expecting such a long thread on what can be a simple function... Affinity is great, but sometimes it seems to (delight in?) making simple things complicated... I've read through the whole thread and tried various solutions, but none is as good as Gimp's for this, which is rather frustrating. Really hoping this will be added as a feature in future. 

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1 hour ago, Pixelated said:

I'm switching over from Gimp to Affinity and I too am frustrated by the lack of a quick, easy colour swap function. I wasn't expecting such a long thread on what can be a simple function... Affinity is great, but sometimes it seems to (delight in?) making simple things complicated... I've read through the whole thread and tried various solutions, but none is as good as Gimp's for this, which is rather frustrating. Really hoping this will be added as a feature in future. 

Have you tried using the color selection in HSL? 

It's not as good as the replace color tool in Photoshop but it's close enough for my work, at least. This feature was added after this thread was created. Back when I started using Affinity Photo, there was nothing like this. 

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  • 6 months later...

So we have a tool called "colour replacement brush" yet the Help system (such as it is) draws a complete blank. Always a warning sign, that.

Time and again the questioner asks, "sure, but how do I select the colour to be replaced" and gets nothing useful back.

Is this one of Affinity's famous black holes which is either due to there being no such working feature or because the question is "too simple to bother answering".

My least favourite response is "you don't want to do that, you should do something completely different".

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2 hours ago, Paul Martin said:

So we have a tool called "colour replacement brush" yet the Help system (such as it is) draws a complete blank. Always a warning sign, that.

The online Help works for me. Here's a screenshot.

 

Screenshot_20210211-150551.png

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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  • 2 years later...

This seems unnecessary complicated in all solutions, and still not fixed in Jan 2024. If someone has a good solution, I would be very happy hearing about it. I think the OP is misunderstood, and many others in the thread. We are not looking for HSL adjustment, overlaying, selecting different parts of the photo. We would like to tell Affinity, that wherever the colour F8F2E4 pops up, it shall be replaced with 86BC30 for instance.

I am working on a simple webpage with 4-5 colours right now (not my area, I am using Affinity rarely as a hobby for personal photos, and I don't design webpages) for a friend, who asked me about colour palette ideas, and how we could check how the page would look like using them. Currently the main background colours are shades of grey, and the colour replacement brush tool doesn't do anything about them. Again, as this is a screenshot of a webpage, there is quite a lot of text everywhere, and I would like to avoid having to click into every nook and cranny, to select the areas I would like to work on. 

The closest solution seems to be this, but it seems like you still have to select each object, and it is in Affinity Designer, not in Affinity Photo: 

 

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20 minutes ago, FLaci said:

This seems unnecessary complicated in all solutions, and still not fixed in Jan 2024. If someone has a good solution, I would be very happy hearing about it. I think the OP is misunderstood, and many others in the thread. We are not looking for HSL adjustment, overlaying, selecting different parts of the photo. We would like to tell Affinity, that wherever the colour F8F2E4 pops up, it shall be replaced with 86BC30 for instance.

I am working on a simple webpage with 4-5 colours right now

To quickly change the color of objects that you created and assigned colors to (i.e., vector objects, text, etc…. not a photo), I would use global colors so that the colors can easily be changed.

https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/pages/Clr/globalClr.html

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