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

[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