seans0th

Hello everyone,

This is my first post, it looks like a great community you have here and I hope I can contribute.

I'm posting because I'm having a bit of a problem changing solid background colors. I have about 80 small .jpg images with a solid tan background color, and I need to change the background color to white. I tried using the magic wand, but there is some small text in the images and it always looses a noticeable amount of quality when I use the wand. I seem to remember a really quick good way that involved creating a new solid color layer and changing the blend mode, but for the life of me I can't remember. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm attaching a sample of the type of images I'll be working with.

Any tips greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

pkjain

Hi outshine,
I will give you some out lines to do it, i think the senior embers are busy and my post will help you a little.

First of all if you want to change the background of your image to white then add a new layer and use magic background eraser tool if you are using PS CS/CS2, use the brush size to too small and erase the background on your image.that will work fine leaving the little amount of edges,later you can remove them using normal eraser tool in less opaque.
OR
>Use quick mask by selecting the image layer in the layer palate and hit 'Q' on the keyboard that will make you quick select the image, then zoom the image up to your display(large).

Now take the brush tool (lower the size of the brush to small)and carefully paint on the image after completely painting hit the ' Q ' button again on the keyboard that gives you the selection and now hit ctrl+shift+i on the keyboard to inverse the selection and erase the background completely.

That's it your all done i am very eager to write a tutorial on selections in PS because the newbies of PS users don't know how to make perfect selections and in Photo shop tools are changing during change of time.There are many ways to make selections.

Thanks to u for giving me this opportunity to write this information here.hope this will help you to some extent and other members will always ready to help you always.

seans0th

Hi, thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I have over 80 images and I was hoping that there may be a way that wouldn't require me to manually erase, paint or outline the image. Is there anyway to just replace the tan color with white, without actually zooming in and editing the image?

Thanks!

ronmatt

OK... you may be able to write an action on this, but I'm not sure about the sliders; anyway...
use the magic wand with a tolerence of 15 anti aliased Not that the aa really matters in this case..Click on the background then Select > simular, this is to pick up the color inside the text.... Then Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer...Then move all the sliders to 200.
Do this for all 3 colors. You'll now have a white background and without an action, less than a minute each. Or you could copy a bunch at a time to a new window and merge them then do the same process on the merged sets. The type will be a bit thinner bet it reads ok and will actually look cleaner.

Here's an edit...you can write an action for this procedure, which will cut your processing time dwon considerably [righton]

seans0th

ronmatt, that looks like a great solution! Thanks for taking the time to help me out, I really appreciate it.

troubadour

I'm no expert - but would Image>Adjustments>Replace Color not work? Just select the buff colour and move the Lightness indicator to 100. 10 seconds flat.

seans0th

Troubador,

Thank you! That is *exactly* what I was looking to do. Works like a charm, and only takes a couple of seconds. I think I'm gonna put together a batch action to handle them all at once.

Thanks again!