Noticed that theres been a fair few topics about Photo-shopped bikes and post your picture and i will change it. Well now, for all of you out there who have Photoshop but don't know how to change the colours, heres how... Right, first off you will obviously need adobe photoshop, if you don't have this... well then your not going to make much sense of whats to come. Firstly, you need to open photoshop, i am using adobe photoshop CS2 but it shouldnt matter which version you have to use the simple tools i will be using. Ok, now i opened photoshop i am going to find the picture i want to use. The picture below is the one i will be using so im going to drag that into photoshop and it should just import it as an image file. Right, now, i find it easier to maximize the window that the picture is in, this way you get the most view of the picture, although the small floating toolbox's do get in the way a lot. Below i have maximized the image window and resized some of the toolbox windows as they get in the way sometimes. Ok, now youve got your picture and your ready to start colour changing. In my picture i am going to be changing the red parts, to green. Below i have zoomed into the end of the handlebars which is where i am going to start the colour changing. Go to the main toolbox which has the selection, brush tools etc and find the polygonal lasso tool. If you can see the lasso tool, right click on it and select the polygonal lasso tool. Draw around the area that you want to change the colour of by clicking, each single click defines a corner in the shape, you can do as many clicks as you want but don't click to fast otherwise it will think that you are double clicking and it will automatically end your selection. Draw carefully around the area and you will eventually come back to where you started. Click on where you started and it should select the area for you, or you can double click to get the same effect. Now go to image ---> Adjustments ---> Hue and saturation. Once this window has appeared you will need to press the box in the bottom right called "colorize". This will change your selection to colour instead of black and white. Now its just a case of playing with the 3 dials until you find the colour you want. Hue = where abouts on the spectrum of colour you are. Saturation = How strong you want the selected colour to be. Lightness = How bright/dark the colour is. I find it a lot easier if i save the colour that i want to use, otherwise every time you make a new selection you will have to find the colour you used last time again. So its best to save the colour you just made so you can load it later on. Now that i have filled in my first selection in green, and i have selected the second area i am going to go back to hue and saturation and then i am going to load the colour i saved from last time. This makes it so much easier than guessing what colour i used last time. Below is a picture of the bike after i have continued this process across the whole length of the handlebars. Now i am going to start on the rim but i am going to show you another tool that you can use to the same kind of effect as the polygonal lasso. If you look in the main tool bar window you should be able to see the "magic wand" tool. In the picture below i have selected the correct tool that you will need to find. Once you have found this tool, you can try it out by clicking on an area of colour that you want to change. This tool will highlight an area around where you clicked which shares a colour similar to th pixel you clicked on. This tool works very well for solid colours but not very well for shades. If you look towards the top left of the screen you will see a box called "tolerance". This option can be used to tell photoshop how wide a range of shades it should select for you. For example if you have the tolerance on 0 it will select a very small range of shades around the pixel you clicked on but if you have the tolerance on 100 it will select pretty much anything that is red or orange. This option can be tweaked to select the biggest area you can without selecting part of the background in my case. Ive set the tolerance on 32 as shown below. I have no clicked on the same area but with the tolerance set to 90. As you can see its selected a much bigger area than before, so it may be a good idea to use the magic wand tool instead of the lasso at times. I'm just going to go ahead and change this selection to green now. Below is what will happen if you put the tolerance on the magic wand too high up, it will select colours that you don't want it to select. Below i have selected one of my crank arms with the polygonal lasso tool and i have adjusted the option at the top called "feather". The feather option is how many pixels around your selection you want photoshop to blend or fade the new colour into. For example i have selected 10 pixels all around it, so you get a glowing effect... which is bad for me at the moment, but i suppose you could make some cool effects with it. Below i have put the feather back down to 0 and reselected the crank arm and coloured them both green. Below i have done the front rim and the front hub (very rushed) Finally the completed bike with green components instead of red. Hope this has helped some people, and i expect to see lots of Photo-shopped pictures appearing soon. Clawz
