From Photoshop 911 Forums:
One of the common reasons for changing colors is to be able to look at an object and see what it would look like in another color. We get quite a few requests for this kind of technique for people colorizing houses, cars, people's clothing, and from time to time a boat or two. Boats present a special problem because if you're out on your boat, you can't easily take a picture of it -- and it just doesn't have the same excitement when sitting at the dock.
In this case, the user needed to see what lettering would look like on his boat while on the water. The challenge is two-fold -- first having to find a picture of the boat to use, recolorizing it, then adding the graphics. Fortunately, they were able to find a photo of the same boat, but it was a green model rather than blue.
Select Areas to be Colorized: We begin by making a selection of the green part of the boat using the Lasso tool. It's a fairly clean cut line, so there's not a lot of problem getting a good selection. (Here's the selection)
As soon as the selection suits us, click the "QuickMask" button (or tap the letter "Q") and immediately the selection will be revealed as a mask. (Here's the selection in QuickMask mode)
Save the Selection: Before continuing, it's a good idea to save your selection. That way we can add to it and modify it without fear of losing work done so far.
Tap "Q" again to take us out of QuickMask mode, and your selection (racing ants) will return. Now,
Choose Menu: Select > Save Selection (at the bottom of the menu) Name and confirm the dialog and your selection will appear on the Channels palette.
Isolating Details: To remove elements from the selection, we'll use a little-known trick to isolate and automatically mortise out features that would normally take some time.
Make Rough Selection Again, I use the Lasso tool to make an approximate, rough selection around the object to be masked out of the channel.
Delete from Selection Now, with the Magic Wand tool, I'll first hold down the Option (Alt) key -- and note a tiny "minus" symbol appears next to the cursor. This indicates I'll be "subtracting" from the selection.
Click inside that selection and you'll suddenly see the selection tighten around the object -- in this case, the label "Wellcraft".
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from the Editor:
I was delighted that day back in 1989 when Peggy Killburn called to ask if I could handle one more speaker in my "Great Graphics Tips & Tricks" session scheduled for the 1990 Macworld Expo. "Yes" was my response to her request to add Russell Brown to my panel. After all, we loved Adobe's young "Illustrator" program, and were quite anxious to try out their upcoming new product called "Photoshop." After seeing his demo, I was convinced Photoshop would be big. So the next month we added "Photoshop Tips & Tricks" to our regular DTG Magazine uploads to Compuserve, GEnie and AOL. The rest is history.
I only regret that I didn't trademark the name.
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