PS CS4: What's New — Color Range II

Another new function of Color Range in CS4 — the Range slider. You're going to love it.

Well, there's the challenge — I want to select only the two yellow bands, circled in green, in an image that has many shades of yellow in many different areas. The first thing we want to take a look at, though, is how well previous versions of Color Range could handle this.

With the Localized Color Clusters box unchecked, one click of the Eyedropper was placed in the center of the yellow band on the right. After that, the +Eyedropper was selected and several clicks were made in the band on the left.

From the Preview window, you can see that basically all of the yellows were selected, circled in red. The Fuzziness (my only slider) was pulled down in an effort to eliminate the unwanted yellows — to no avail. Try as I would, the selection of all the yellows shrank as the Fuzziness was reduced.

Here I've tried subtracting the unwanted yellows with the -Eyedropper Tool, circled in red.

Unfortunately, no luck. Sections of all the yellows started going away, and then...

I got this "Can't subtract any color because only one color is fully selected now." message. In short, I could not, in any way, remove the unwanted yellows.

The best I'd be able to do with the old version of Color Range would be to accept the selection, then go back into the image with the Lasso Tool and manually de-select those horrid unwanted yellows. What a pain.

To the rescue comes the new and improved Color Range dialog box with the Range slider.

As with the previous method, I clicked in several places within only the two yellow bands circled in green, above.

The percent figure for the Range slider basically answers the question, "How far away from the clicked point(s) should I go to make a selection?" With the Range pulled down quite far (say, 10% or less), a very small circular area around the clicked spot is selected. If there are multiple spots clicked, multiple small circular areas will be selected. As you increase the Range perentage, the diameter of the circular selection increases.

As you can see, with the Range set at 100%, all the yellows in the entire image are selected. Still unacceptable.

The solution comes in pulling the Range percent down.

In doing this, I'm forcing the selection to stay closer to "home". Home meaning only those spots on which I clicked.

I'm not quite convinced the selection is perfect, but it is a vast improvement over what I could have accomplished with the old Color Range.

In fact, seeing how disappointing those results were, I probably would not even have used the old Color Range for this selection.

Color Range Tutorials: