Replacing color in a certain section

[cweis127]

I'm not sure if this question has been answered or not, but for the record, I did a search for answers to my question.

 

But anyways, is there any way to highlight a section of a picture or, in my case, a .GIF drawing, and replace one color with another to eliminate having to go through and color every pixel individually? The drawings I work with, as mentioned earlier, are downloaded and published .GIF, but I edit them as .PNG's to eliminate the grainy look when saving the finished drawing, therefore, making it still able to edit.

 

If anyone  could make suggestions or has a way to solve this, please let me know. It is greatly appreciated 

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Hello cweis127 and welcome to the paint.net forum

 

Yes there is an easy way to do this.  In paint.net any active selection will ignore subsequent editing operations which occur outside of the active selection.  This means the edge of a selection acts like a border.

 

You can use this feature along with the Recolor Tool (Keyboard key = R) to recolor only some areas of an image.

 

Here's how:

 

1. Open your image.

2. Make a selection with any of the selection tools or any combination of the tools.

3. Activate the Recolor Tool

4. Set the Primary color to the shade you want to introduce.

5. Set the Recoloring tool options in the Tool Bar (Brush width, Hardness & Tolerance).  Most importantly, set the Sampling mode to Sampling Once.

 

 

6. Using the Left mouse button "paint" the new color over the old.  As you set the Sampling Mode to Sampling Once, the first color you click on will become the target color which gets replaced.

 

Here you can see that I've recolored the road blue.  All the recoloring has been automatically clipped inside the elliptical selection.

 

[cweis127]

First off, here's the link to the source of the drawings that I work with: http://trainiax.net/

 

Below is an example of my painted versus the original unpainted version, below that.

 

Now. What I do, is I make any changes that I want while the drawing is plain white, as you'll see. Then I color in the smaller details (such as the brown on the couplers and wheels and rail.) Then I'll go in up to 1200-1600% zoom levels to take the drawing section by section. If you zoom in on the image, you can see what I work with, pixel art, and all. But what I'm looking for is a way that I can color a WHOLE section by selecting with the select tool, setting the colors, then clicking inside that section once and the paint looks for that color such as (Primary color will replace the Secondary color [selected section; White].) In hopes to eliminate taking the drawing section at a time and destroying my mouse going around and repeatedly clicking throughout these pixels.

 

Similar to going into MS Word and doing a "Find and Replace" where you type the word that you want replaced with one to replace it, while retaining the font and text size exactly as they were.

 

I hope this made sense. 

Edited June 10, 2015 by cweis127

[MJW]

I'm not completely sure what you want to do, but perhaps the Paint Bucket tool will help. Select the color you want as the Primary Color, then click on the color you want to replace.

[pdnnoob]

You have described the paint bucket tool almost perfectly. It finds everything like the pixel(s) you click on and replaces it with the primary color (secondary if you right click)

Just make sure, since this is pixel art we're dealing with, you disable anti-alias so it doesn't mess up your lines.

[Cc4FuzzyHuggles]

For re-coloring things, I suggest you first duplicate your image and re-color the duplicate. Duplicating will keep your original untouched in case of mistakes.
 
Now then, for some re-coloring ideas.
As others have pointed out, have you tried the paint bucket tool and tested it with different tolerance levels? It can be used on it's own to fill any area or it can be used to fill selections.

Or perhaps a plugin would help you. (How to install plugins?)
Please note, each of these plugins function in their own unique way. Some of them might take some getting used to. These plugins will work without selections and also with selections.

Recolour choice
For this plugin, your primary color will be the color you are replacing and your secondary color will be the new color. Before running the plugin, you can use the color picker tool :PaintDotNet.Icons.ColorPickerTo to set the color you want to replace. Left clicking with the color picker sets your primary color. (With the plugin's settings, try playing with the "detection tolerance %")

Advanced Color Replacement
For this plugin, your secondary color will be the color you are replacing, while your primary color will be the new color. Again, before running the plugin, you can use the color picker tool :PaintDotNet.Icons.ColorPickerTo to set the color you want to replace. Right clicking with the color picker will set your secondary color. (Settings to try: threshold 0, and roughness 20.)

Hue / Saturation Plus
This plugin does not work with your primary and secondary colors, which can make it a little trickier to use. However, once you learn how to use the plugin, it is a very good plugin.

Conditional Hue/Saturation
This plugin works like the one above and does not work with your primary and secondary colors. It's learning difficulty is a little tougher for some people.

Tips on how to use it.
The right side of the plugin's user interface (UI) is the side you use to select your color range (the color you want to replace). You can right click and left click on the color wheel to adjust the color range, as well as use the slider adjustments which are located below the color wheel. Some of the slider adjustments allow you to adjust the saturation of your color range.

The left side of the plugin's UI has the re-coloring sliders and adjustments.
The first slider is the slider that will give you a new color. The other sliders let you change the saturation and lightness of your new color so that you can produce the color you want. For the "Lightness Action", remember to click on "Add" or "Set" in order for it to work.

 

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Edited June 14, 2015 by Cc4FuzzyHuggles

[Seerose]

@ERR, MJW, pdnnoob and Cc4FuzzyHuggles! I    all of you. I have learned again what new.  

[Rick Brewster]

By the way, new for 4.0 and the Paint Bucket is the ability to choose the Sampling Mode: Layer or Image.

 

The default is "Layer". Using "Image" would allow you to create a new layer for doing your paint bucket fills non-destructively in a new layer (I'm looking at that choo-choo train specifically). Try it out

[MJW]

Recolour choice by Red ocher, which Cc4FuzzyHuggles mentioned, is a very useful plugin which seems to do pretty much what cweis127 asked for, but I will mention one possible point of confusion. It doesn't actually use the Primary and Secondary colors. Like many plugins, the first time it runs after starting PDN, the first color will default to the Primary Color, and the second to the Secondary Color. Once it's run (by clicking OK), the current colors will be saved and used the next time it's run. I suggest plugin writers consider allowing the user to select between using a User Color or the Primary or Secondary Color, to allow the Color Picker to be used. (The solution isn't perfect. I find it a little confusing to have the User Color Wheel displaying a different color from the one actually being used.)

[MJW]

I wasn't aware of the Image/Layer choice for the Paint Bucket. That's pretty neat. I'm sure I'll have a use for it.

[cweis127]

Wow. Thanks a lot for the help I tried paint bucket, and found that changing the flood mode to global, as oppose to contiguous will fill that ENTIRE section and keep the lines with antialias disabled. That's great for coloring the carbody of the locomotive, but in places like the frame where the sky background is visible, it colors that in as well. Does that have to do with the tolerance at all?

[MJW]

If the sky is a different color from the area you're coloring, you should probably be able to exclude it by reducing the tolerance. Since you're dealing with pretty much flat colored regions, a low tolerance should work well. If that doesn't work, you can either use selections to exclude the area you don't want colored, or color in one connected region at a time with Contiguous fills. Since the picture has many rectangular regions, much of the selections can be done with the Rectangle select. Remember you can use the Move Selection tool to modify a selection. The selections can also be added to or subtracted from. Edit>Invert Selection is often useful.

Edited June 13, 2015 by MJW

[Ishi]

If its a small section of image that needs to be recolored, I'd do a manual re-coloring if it was me. I'd create a new transparent layer on top of my image, change its blending mode to overlay or multiply, select this layer and manually paint the color of my choice on the area that needs some repainting using a soft brush. If its a bigger area, I could simply paint at the sides first using the brush then use the bucket tool to fill the center. In contrary to using plugins, its gives me far more control and precision on my brush work, only that you'll need a steady hand. I could even apply just a very small value of Guassian  blur so the repainted color kinda blends in with the rest with some sort of "transition fade" around the edges if the soft brush wasn't enough. I could then adjust the layer opacity or my color layer if I want it lighter in shade. Multiply and Overlay work the best for me and did some good image manipulations with this technique.

[Cc4FuzzyHuggles]

Recolour choice by Red ocher, which Cc4FuzzyHuggles mentioned, is a very useful plugin which seems to do pretty much what cweis127 asked for, but I will mention one possible point of confusion. It doesn't actually use the Primary and Secondary colors. Like many plugins, the first time it runs after starting PDN, the first color will default to the Primary Color, and the second to the Secondary Color. Once it's run (by clicking OK), the current colors will be saved and used the next time it's run.

 

Have you tried clicking the "reset" buttons, which are the large arrow buttons that are under the R G B settings? I learned with the "Cut Color" plugin that some reset buttons will reset the colors to whatever your current primary/secondary colors are.

[MJW]

Thanks, Cc4FuzzyHuggles! I should have realized that Reset would set the colors to the Primary and Secondary, but I guess I sort of thought they'd be reset to the initial values when the effect was last run (even though that really doesn't make a lot of sense.). That's quite useful to know.

[midora]

I find it a little confusing to have the User Color Wheel displaying a different color from the one actually being used.)

 

That's by the design of the API. Paint.NET stores on OK all PropertyBased settings in an object called 'token'. If you reopen the plugin in a session then all its settings will be restored from the token (they are overriding the initial settings).

Edited June 15, 2015 by midora

[MJW]

Midora, though I was clearly confused about what reset does for Color Wheel controls, that was a separate matter. It probably isn't very clear from the way I stated it, but what I was referring to was the situation where a plugin allows a choice of color sources, such as Secondary and Primary, along with a User Color chosen using a Color Wheel control. If Primary is the selected color source, and, say, the color is black, but the User Control shows blue, I sometimes forget that the color I'm using isn't blue, since it's so prominently displayed. Obviously I'm not too hard to confuse, so it may just be me who might be confused by that.

[midora]

If Primary is the selected color source, and, say, the color is black, but the User Control shows blue, I sometimes forget that the color I'm using isn't blue, since it's so prominently displayed. Obviously I'm not too hard to confuse, so it may just be me who might be confused by that.

 

That would confuse me too. Typically the developer should use PropertyRules in this case to disable (gray out) the color wheel.

But I don't think that you can define PropertyRules in CodeLab.

[9Edits]

Sorry to bring back up an old discussion, but how do I take a color from a selection and delete it(make it transparent)?

[skullbonz]

  Try this;     http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?showtopic=15595

 

 

Use the eye dropper tool to select the color you want to delete first, then use the grim color reaper at default settings.

Edited October 20, 2015 by skullbonz