Question on colorizing

[vinniesworld]

What's the best and most effective way to colorize pure white. The only way that I've came up with is to use multiply mode on the color layer.

[Doug Nelson]

Pure white is R0,G0,B0 so there's no tone to colorize. The only way to colorize it is to add tone.

[byRo]

Just to flesh it out a bit......

What we see as color is actually the difference between the R,G,B values.
So if a point is RGB 192,140,160 the red channel is stronger so it's going to look a bit red; RGB 255,255,50 is a pretty full yellow (red + green).

Full white, in RGB values is 255,255,255, which are the maximum values allowed in each channel - so it figures that if you want some color (difference in the values) the only way to go is is down.

Using multiply on the colorizing layer may work, seeing as that will always make the image darker, but it may be simpler just to tone the levels down.

You could try this: do a levels adjust, setting the maximum output level to something like 200 - now you've got the elbow room (down and up) you need to do some "normal" colorizing.

Hope this helped.

Rô

[Doug Nelson]

Of course it's 255,255,255, I had a senior moment

[vinniesworld]

Thanks byRo, looks like that's the way to go, did as you suggested, played with color mode and then revisited levels to tweak it.