Convert black to white

[Dureox]

Hello guys,

I want to know if and how I can convert black into a realistic white without losing the black shadows. How I can do this? Thanks in advance

Best regards,

Dureox

[Old Bruce]

Not seeing the picture I would suggest judicious use of masks and a curves layer.

[Lee D]

As @Old Bruce suggests, seeing the picture and more information on what you want to do will help.

[Fixx]

In PS normal procedure would be select blacks with magic wand, select similar, fill with white. Unfortunately AP selection tools cannot do this.

But then I do not know what "realistic" means here.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, Fixx said:

In PS normal procedure would be select blacks with magic wand, select similar, fill with white. Unfortunately AP selection tools cannot do this.

Are you sure about that? Have you tried unchecking the "Continuous" box in the context toolbar when using the Flood Select Tool (a.k.a. the magic wand)?

[matisso]

On 3/27/2019 at 5:39 PM, Dureox said:

I want to know if and how I can convert black into a realistic white without losing the black shadows. How I can do this? Thanks in advance

Since you haven’t provided any example, I assume that would be, for instance, turning black cloth to white? In this case, like @Old Bruce said, masks and adjustments. But that may be a tricky one to nail. Light will bounce quite differently against black than white (so shadows in the original picture will look different that they would have if the object was truly white) and even if you manage to make it white, making it realistic and convincing will requite you to go quite the extra mile with additional adjustments and possibly some manual editing. There’s no easy way of doing it, I’m afraid. 16-bit file would be very good for that kind of manipulation since adjustments will be rather intensive and you’re likely to run into banding when doing such stuff in 8 bits.

regards,
Matt

[Fixx]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Are you sure about that? Have you tried unchecking the "Continuous" box in the context toolbar when using the Flood Select Tool (a.k.a. the magic wand)?

Tool seems to select by hue value only and ignores luminosity.

[R C-R]

15 minutes ago, Fixx said:

Tool seems to select by hue value only and ignores luminosity.

In the Mac version of Affinity Photo, depending on the tolerance value it seems to include luminosity, at least to some extent, but it isn't obvious to me how that works.

[firstdefence]

This might require some masking but in this image I tried to turn the black cloth to white and then invert the shadows and white without losing the white.

 

First set was to turn it into black and white so I applied the Black and white adjustment filter

Then I inverted the the Layer

Next I tried inverting the highlights that were in the black cloth and that were now shadows in white cloth without turning it back to black. I considered Shadows and highlights the best option and set the blend mode to Negation, the shadow slider to 200% and the highlight slider to -200%

This was the result, not bad for a 5 min test.

 

Bear in mind my focus was on the background cloth nothing else.