: Recolor jersey - how do I colorize white? I saw this image where someone recolored the jerseys with new colors. And I wanted to try my own take on this. I can recolor the jerseys fine with

@Nimeshi706

The available accuracy is limited by the resolution and sharpness of your photo. Your example photos are lo-res web images. Do not expect razor sharp color separations from them.

At first remove the white background. There's no magic bullet for it due the white logos, texts and decorative patterns at the edge of the cloth. You must draw a clipping path or use the lasso tools. The quick selection tool often draws a good border for clear areas, but the selection must be in several places fixed by adding or subtracting something by lasso tools (hold alt or shift for modification the selection). The magic wand is useless.

When the background is removed, create a wihite test layer and a work copy of the cloth layer. The work copy will lose its color soon. Save also the selection of the cloth for easy redo in case of a fatal error later.



Go to the work copy. Adjust its contrast (Image > Adjustments > Curves) to make actually white, but grey in the photo really white. Be careful not to whiten colored areas by adding the effect too much. Some areas must be accepted to stay grey.



Select the white and gery areas as a single selection by the color selection method. Pick at first the white and add the greys until you see the selection to be complete enough. Do not worry for some small unwanted stripes that are also selected at the edges of the cloth. We kill them in the finale.



Disable the work copy layer, select the cloth layer

Now it's the time to change your whites and grays to some color. You really should make an adjustment layer for this to be non-destructive and to be able to fix the unavoidable glitches here and there.

Goto Layer > New Adjustment layer > Hue/Saturation. Your selection of white and gray transforms automatically to the proper layer mask.

Cross "Colorize", reduce the lightness, adjust Hue and Saturation for the wanted color. All three must be adjusted.



Switch the white test background ON. You probably see unwanted colorized pixels at the edges and maybe some white pixels too that do not have color. The unwanted colored areas vanish very easily by painting black into the layer mask. The non-colored white pixels need careful whitening in the mask by the pencil tool.

Paint into the mask black onto all areas that must stay grey or white.

The result:



Save it as PSD for reworking. Save the snapshots as PNG or JPG.

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