Need Lots and Lots of Help!

I've always been interested in graphics etc etc. At school(HS), I have used that crappy PhotoDeluxe thing, and I quickly outgrew its amateur tools. So I splurged and went out and got Adobe Webcolletion today. So far I've only installed PS 6.0. I'm really really lost. I've managed to use some filters etc. but thats about the extent of my knowledge. I also used some layers, but they are kinda confusing. Anyone know of a way to get started on learning all the cool stuff I see you guys do? I also have one specific question, how do I change the color of an object? For example, take a blue car, and make it red, but not affect the background, only the car itself. Ok, thanks.

Brandon

About the car, you'll have to select it using for example the poligonal selection tool or the extract tool. Then use the hue/saturation command.

Good sites to learn:

http://www.teamphotoshop.com
http://www.eyeball-design.com
http://www.wastedyouth.com
http://www.designsbymark.com

Also, check their link sections and keep visiting this forum asking us alot

You should also try reading the manual that came with Photoshop. And maybe buy a book on Photoshop. A lot of the tutorials on the 'net are really good, but some don't cover the basics, or go into detail about things that you need to know like a good book will.

I'm a huge believer in reading everything you can get your hands on, including
the manual that comes on the CD, 3rd-party books (I highly recommend Deke McClelland's Photoshop Bible), magazines, online tutorials...everything. If you are referred to good websites....BOOKMARK 'EM! You may not think you'll need it at the time, but they might come in handy later. Having a book to look at in your lap on on the desk is great because it's easier to refer to than switching back & forth to another screen on your computer...plus, you can take a book to the bathroom or read it in bed! I've been using Photoshop since version 2.5 and I still add books to my library. And always make an effort to find answers in the CD/html manual that comes with the program, on in online tutorials (become good friends with GOOGLE for all your tutorial searching needs) before asking for help. Most experienced users (me in particular) hate it when new users don't take the initiative to avail themselves of the information commonly available.

And experiment a lot.

Now, just to get you started with that car. Choose the Lasso Tool (hit the letter "L" on your keyboard for quick access...SHIFT+ L will cycle through the 3 lasso tools.) and click and drag around anything in the image, but NOT the car, that is blue or even remotely close to blue. To select more than one object, hold the Shift key while selecting the 2nd, 3rd, 4th objects etc. Now, select the inverse of these selections by using the keyboard shortcut of Command/CTRL+Shift+I (press these keys simultaneously). The only thing that will be selected now that is in the blue range will be the car. Now, in your main menu, go to Image....Adjust...Selective Color... Click the button at the bottom that says "Absolute". You'll notice a drop down menu at the top, and by default it starts at "Red". Drop that menu...you may have to choose "Cyans" or "Blues" depending on the hues you want to affect. The sliders below that will now only affect the "blueish" colors in you selection. If you followed the directions above, all of the reddish objects in your image except the car should be DE-selected. Play around with the sliders until the car is the color you want. You may have to adjust once, hit the OK button, then bring up the Selective Color dialogue box again to tweak it out.

Let us know how that works out for you...

Thanks for all the help everyone. I tried your tip Utopian. It worked, to an extent. I could get some colors, but not others. I couldn't get anything drastic. For instance, I tried it on a blue car, I could get some shades of green, black, greyish, and purplish. I couldn't get bright reds, yellows, blues, anything vibrant. I know there is a way to do this because I've seen pictures of cars done where the original color was bright yellow(chrome yellow--mustang color ) which was turned into red(laser red, another mustang color) and it looked great. Any ideas?

There are quite a few different ways to effect a color change like this, and the method one uses could be determined by the quality of the scan, the lighting when the picture was taken...many factors could come into play.

Post a link to a high-quality JPEG of your image and we'll have a look-see!

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme2/brandonspics/stang1.jpg

Here's the link to my car. This is a different car than I was working on, but it will provide a good base to start w/. Try to see if you can make it red or white or something, not close to the orginal color. If you can, post how ya did it w/ the new pic please. I hope this link works heh.

I dunno if this link will work, you just gotta copy/paste into your browser, sorry.

Damn, angelfire won't let me host...well, damn.

Well that's gonna' be a tough image to work with, since the colors on the front of the car, the ground, and the tree are a close color match.

I'm going to bed right now, but if Utopian hasn't done it by tomorrow when I get back on, I'll have a try.

I'm signing up at Photopoint.com right now so I can show you the picture. It will be a min.

I didn't spend a whole lot of time on this, but it'll give you an idea of what's possible. The original car was red, and the yellow was the most difficult.

I started with a crappy JPEG that I nicked off the 'net, and it looks even worse because I had to resave it as a GIF for the animation to work.

Apologies for the file size.