Advice needed on lightening parts of an image

[MarkC-UK]

Evening all. It's early days in my discovery of PS and things are getting (slowly) easier!

A colleague of mine has an image, which he is reasonably happy with, apart from one aspect. In his opinion the large areas of wood cladding on the walls are too dark and he would prefer them lighter.

Is there a reasonably quick method of accomplishing this or, must I carefully select all the wood cladded areas and use the 'color replace' tool??

Can it be done with layers/blending modes?? I would like to keep (although rough and ready) the wood 'grain' texture if at all possible, rather than replacing it with a solid colour.

I, as ever, would appreciate any pointers!

[ikinman]

What is helpful to do with a rendering like this is to create a material channel with the image. This can be done automatically with a program like Max, or you can create one manually, by doing a second version of the rendering with the same settings but changing all of the materials to self-illuminated solid colors with no lighting. Make the wood solid red, the glass blue, brick yellow, etc. Use the magic wand to select the 'red' and you will have a selection of the wood in the first rendering.

 

Attached are two images that demonstrate what I'm talking about.

 

That makes the selection of the wood easy. Once you have the wood, then work with the look of the material in Photoshop, using the Hue/Sat/Lightness, color correction, brightness/contrast or any of the zillions of tools PS has. Be certain that when you do this you compensate other areas of the image as well - you don't want the wood to look alien from the rest of the image.

[MarkC-UK]

Thanks Ian for your reply. Unfortunately I only have a jpeg image to work with. I have kind of worked something that looks acceptable by making a selection set and then adjusting the lightness slightly.

It just makes the wood a little less oppresive!

[4DM]

Try selecting and copying the wood onto another Layer, and blending in Screen mode.

 

Play around with Layer opacity and Saturation, and then possibly Lightness.

 

Increasing Lightness on its own in Normal blend mode tends to look milky, loses the colour tones, so it isn't too useful on its own.

 

You could also experiment with Levels, and even Curves if you feel really daring....

 

Cheers,

 

D.

[STRAT]

as you say, selecting the wood out and fiddling with it after is the most reasonable method. it's not really a long winded tast, especially as you have several ways open to you. as Danny says, look into layer blending modes too.

[MarkC-UK]

Brilliant advice. The 'screen' blending mode worked really well.

Cheers!