Selective Color Plugin

• Installation
• Quick Start
• Example Uses

Before.

After.

Installation Instructions

To install, simply unzip and copy the plugin file into your Photoshop plugins directory. It's as simple as that! If you run into problems, try the step-by-step instructions below:

Quick Start

Selective Color offers many ways of isolating color ranges, which is why there are so many sliders. This may seem excessive at first but an overkill of options is not a bad thing.

The top section of controls are all color adjustment controls that affect whatever color range is isolated. The bottom section of the GUI is devoted to settings that define what color range is isolated.

Hue: Adjusts the hue of a color.

Saturation: Adjusts the saturation of a color. *This saturation has a slightly different end result than Colormancer.

Vibrance: Same idea as the vibrance control in Adobe Camera RAW. Vibrances changes the saturation of partly saturated colors but does not affect the saturation of fully saturated colors. It is a gamma/midtone-style control on saturation.

One use is to turn vibrance down to make only highly saturated colors stand out.

Mg/Green Tint, Warm/Cool Tints: Adds color tints. You can use these controls to add tints to achromatic (i.e. grey, white) colors as hue and saturation cannot do this.

Gain: Adjust exposure/gain in stops. This is the same idea as the Exposure adjustment in Photoshop CS3+.

Brightness: This adjusts the midtones in the same way as Colormancer. This is most similar to the midtone slider in the Levels adjustment in Photoshop.

Contrast: This adjusts contrast in the same way as Colormancer.

Color Isolation

Start by clicking on the Eyedropper Start button (hotkey E on windows) and drag-selecting the color you want to isolate. The plugin will average the color over that area to reduce noise and then isolate that single averaged value.

You can then drag-select additional areas to add to the color isolation.

Toggle Show matte to see what areas you have isolated. As an alternative, you can use the Tint and/or Gain controls to visualize the isolation by setting them to extreme values.

Get out of the eyedropper mode by clicking on a non-proxy and non-button area.

The difference between the Eyedropper start and Add buttons is that the start button will reset the isolation on the first click.

The Subtract button will bring up an eyedropper that will remove values from the color isolation. In some cases it is better to adjust the color isolation manually.

The effect of the plugin can be limited based on color strength, luminance, the yellow-blueness of a color, and the cyan-redness of a color. The low and high settings define a range of color to isolate based on the specific attribute (color strength, luminance, etc.). It is easiest to isolate a color by starting with the eyedropper to make the initial selection, and then adjusting the low and high sliders to finesse the selection. Use the show matte, tint and/or gain controls to help visualize the isolation. Smooth defines a rolloff between fully isolated and not isolated.

Limit by color strength is useful for dealing with shadow noise. If noisy parts of the image are in the isolation/matte/mask, increasing the Low setting under limit by color strength is the best way of get rid of that. Color strength is higher for brighter colors than dark colors. For example, if there is a gradient from 0 0 0 RGB to 255 0 0 RGB, the color strength will go from 0 to 255.

Limit by luminance can be used to apply color to a specific luminance range.

Limit by Yellow-Blue and Limit by Cyan-Red isolate based on how pure the color is in either dimension. Isolating ranges close to 0 will isolate colors with very low saturation such as greys and whites. You can fine-tine your color isolation by slowly moving these sliders left and right and finding the setting that keeps the most wanted color and rejects the most unwanted colors. Use the "Eyedropper Start" button to help you determine the initial range of the color you want to isolate.

Reset All: Resets all values.

Reset Top: Resets the controls that aren't responsible for the color isolation: hue, vibrance, saturation, the tint controls, gain, and the show original and show matte buttons.

Invert: Lets you invert the isolation based on that particular criteria. If you check the invert overall checkbox, then you can achieve effects such as the color pass effects in movies like Pleasantville, Schindler's List, etc. Isolate the color you wish to keep, check the invert overall checkbox, and then set saturation to 0.

Example Uses

How to quickly isolate a color and change it: One way to quickly isolate a color is to use the eyedropper start button and then rapidly click on the area to isolate. Use the show matte, tint, or gain controls if you need to visualize the isolation. After you have most of the color range selected, drag the smooth settings higher under the "limit by" sections. You may wish to disable "limit by color strength" (enabled by default).

Because most real world scenes tend to have overlapping colors, you may not be able to perfectly isolate an area of color. In these cases, you should use a combination of Selective Color and layer masking to easily target the areas you wish to target. Selective Color can operate as a Smart Filter and can be used with Smart Filter masking.

Hit the reset top button to clear any color tweaking settings. You can now use the hue, saturation, gain, or other sliders to manipulate the selected color range.

Layer mask generation: Check the "show matte" checkbox and render out the plug-in to a new layer. Go into Channels (Windows --> Channels). Select any one of the RGB channels and click the "Load channels as selection" button.

Increase contrast only in midtones: Use the "Limit by luminance" controls to isolate only the midtones. Uncheck all the "limit by" checkboxes except for Limit by Luminance. Set Low, High, and Smooth to values such as 50, 205, 50. Click the "Reset Top" button and set contrast to your desired value.

Changes

v1.1.4: Double-clicking on a setting name will reset it. Improved stability.

v1.1.1: (Mac only) Save + load settings default directory now sticks, added Mac Photoline compatibility

v1.1.0: Multi-threaded for faster performance, x64 PC support, clicking on proxy shows original image