Colorize 2 tone plaid?

[Chris W.]

Well hello all...it's been ages since I've posted as I've been busy in my new work as a photographer. I still dabble here and there in photo restoration but it's been a while. I've got a customer who handed me the attached photo to colorize but then told me the dress on the little girl was a 2 tone blue and red plaid.

My question is, is there a way to do this in photoshop? I can colorize in one color either blue or red, but I'm not sure if there is a way to do a 2 color colorization.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Christie

[Swampy]

You might try doing an image search for a nice plaid, define it as a pattern then use the Pattern Stamp Tool to paint it in over the dress. Use the liquify tool to push the plaid around so it follows the fold lines?

I didn't scale this pattern at all so that might be another option and use it as a Pattern overlay.

[philbach]

Well I tried a different approach. I selected the dress and copied the selection to a separate layer. Then I took Swampy's plaid and increased its resolution and then copied that to the layer above the plaid. I then used the plaid layer as a clipping mask to colorize the dress. I used "color" blending mode on the dress.

The reason I increased the resolution of Swampy's plaid sample was to decrease the distance between the plaid lines when I moved it into the original photos.

[Chris W.]

Wow phil...looks great. I will try increasing the resolution as well and see if I can get the same results.

Thanks to you and Swampy for all the help.

[byRo]

This is a technique that comes in quite useful - especially for colourizing patterned clothing. It may seem a little tricky, but if you understand where we are trying to end up the steps are pretty logical....

1) Make a copy. We are going to play around with the image to produce the colouring. Keep the original safe;

2) Find and use the best channel. Add a Levels adjustment to set the white and black points as per the dress. Don't worry about anything else;

3) KEY STEP: Run the High-pass filter to even out the lights and shadows but still conserve the pattern. (Experiment);

4) Run a suface blur to clean out the noise and make solid blocks of different greys.

5) Make a Gradient Mask with one colour at the lighter grey level and the other at the daker grey level. (Experiment). Set blending of this layer to colour;

6) Stamp a new layer with the result. Put this layer abover your original (you did keep it, didn't you?) and set blending to colour.

7) Mask to the dress.

Hope you got that !!
In the attachment I put in a gradient showing the colours I used.

Rô

[Janet Petty]

Ro, you have done an amazing job. Thank you for the details of how you did this. Such easy steps are a definite bonus. It will come in quite handy for the future.

Janet

[Mining Art]

Thought I would try the plaid. Here is a start, red blue.

[Enkay]

Thanks for sharing that technique byRo, I'll give it a try!

In this case you can't take another pattern and paint it over the original one. It won't match the pattern on the original dress. The colors have to perfectly match the pattern already in place for the restoration to look good!

I don't do much restoration but I might give this a try at a later time.

[Daviskw]

Hi there

If it were me I would not worry about getting too complicated... I just used color layers and painted the plaid in...only took a few minutes..

Sorry I did not read the post carefully...I did not see you wanted red and blue but it makes little difference what color you use.

Butch