isolating red flowers p.114?

[dpnew]

Hi,

I tried to isolate the red flowers using saturation masking, but when I desaturated "Red", it included the window frame. I tried using the slider bars to desaturate a narrower color range, but the window frame and the flowers were still included. To my way of thinking, that means they are the same hue and therefore differ only by brightness when they are desaturated. That led me to consider masking by tone after desaturating, but using the eye dropper tool, I found there was a similar shade of gray in some of the flowers as the window frame, so masking by tone didn't seem promising, and besides that wouldn't be saturation masking.

Any hints to head me in the right direction without giving it away completely?

[Richard_Lynch]

Isolating the red there will be pretty difficult. I don't know that there is an absolute way to get this right without some manual intervention. That is, the red will be similar in color (hue) to the paint on the wood frame, so you may need to do something to isolate the area in the image of the flowers first.

Keep in mind that you can't always automatically separate everything, this is more of a case of trying to pick the bather off the beach using skin tone...you have a lot of bathers in this image when looking at the red. It is probably the most difficult of the colors to isolate.

When a single technique will not work on its own, the book does suggest combining. I think you had a good idea by going to the tone (and it shows you are thinking about the qualities in the image!), but there is sometimes a need to reduce the area od concentration by manual selection first.

OK?

[dpnew]

Hi,

Thanks for the post and the advice.