Photoshop Conundrum, Rarely use it but replace color option seems to misbehave Options

[yarik83]

Hey all.

I rarely use photoshop but when I do its mostly to touch up photos (ie change skin color or deciding on house paint)... for some reason same exact option does not work when I try to change color of a car. It selects pixels and changes color but it does not change color globally. Adding more colors to selection starts changing colors elsewhere and even with max settings car itself looks like a broken plasma tv picture with a whole rainbow of colors. All I am trying to do is taking my old black car and changing color to tan brown color and changing a yellow dragon that I used to have and change that to white. Dragon comes out alright but black to brown conversion comes out looking rather iffy.

Is there a workaround to this? For time being I am able to use stamp tool and magic wand tool to make a really crappy looking photo but at least with last colors.

Thanks for your help

[solidxsnake]

Try using a "Color Balance" adjustment layer, or even a "Hue/Saturation" adujstment layer.

You can set the Hue/Saturation to "Colorize" and then mask off areas you don't want to change. Then you can do as many as you want and mask off each area and colorize it differently.

[yarik83]

Excellent suggestion mate. It works on some areas but overall I have 3 things working against me.
#1 I am using a quality reduced image (only copy I have left since my old pc died 3 years ago)
#2 there are 2 different types of black paint on the car. That was err transitional stage
#3 light hit the car in a weird way creating speckling effect so its really hard to select just the car itself. It tends to select other things too.

This is a start so at least I am getting somewhere

[yarik83]

Edit:

I have added that photo into my profile if anyone wants to play with it.

I am essentially trying to make it same color as celi i have now and yellow dragon white.

[solidxsnake]

Excellent suggestion mate. It works on some areas but overall I have 3 things working against me.
#1 I am using a quality reduced image (only copy I have left since my old pc died 3 years ago)
#2 there are 2 different types of black paint on the car. That was err transitional stage
#3 light hit the car in a weird way creating speckling effect so its really hard to select just the car itself. It tends to select other things too.

This is a start so at least I am getting somewhere

You don't need to select to mask. Use a brush and then edit the mask that is created with the adjustment layer. When the layer is applied, click the white box in the layer menu that corresponds to that layer, then using the brush tool, brush with either black or white to erase/apply the layer.