Essentials Cafe

I have a constant headache when trying to alter the coloring of a graphic to match another.

I eyedropper the original, and take note of the HLS settings.

Then I go to Adjust->Hue & Saturation->HLS  and select colorize.  The current graphic might be, for example, a button, with various shading on it. So I want to change the overall color, let's say, from gray to light blue. So, my intent is to change the HLS to match the color of the other graphic.

Can't do it. The HLS used with the eydropper has a DIFFERENT SCALE than the HLS in adjust. I'm not sure why, but I'd really just like to be able to adjust the HLS of one graphic to the HLS of another.

 

Sorry about your woes baalwww. I have no idea about color spaces and such. Good luck in your endeavor.

Thanks.  I'm not trying to print anything. I have some buttons on a web page, and need to make them a different color. Just frustrated with the eyedropper HSL scale not being the same as the adjust HSL scale. 

Hi baalwwww - I don't really understand why this is happening to you, but I use paint shop pro sometimes, another corel product, for certain aspects of a design and find the eyedropper on there to be accurate enough for my purposes, but I tend to use the rgb settings, which is an accurate record of the colour used, and can go back years later to rework an aspect of an image and nothing has changed. Whether I make a note of rgb settings or even html I have never noticed a shift providing you are sampling a pure colour. HSL is a record of hue, saturation, lightness, but not an actual colour, just a record of how that colour was used as far as I understand it.

Thanks for your thoughts...in reading them it occurs to me that I haven't stated my problem clearly.  I'm not having any problem of shift.

It's pretty simple.  I have a Web button. It's various shades of gray, to make it appear 3D...a jpg.  I have a different Web site, and want the button to look the same, but in a blue hue, not gray. 

 
In Paint and Paintshop Pro, the only way I know to alter a multi-shade (multi-color) graphic to another color with shades, is by changing the HLS settings...to colorize it.  That is, I can't just use the color changer or the paint bucket, because each pixel may be one of hundreds of subtly different shades of the hue, so I need to shift every pixel in the same manner, by changing its hue from gray, in this case, to blue, while retaining the same saturation and lightness level...so that the dark gray portions become equally dark blue, the midtones equally blue midtone, etc.

 When I go into the HLS adjustment ... the saturation, for example, can be set from 0-100.  Likewise there are min-max numbers for Hue and Lightness.  So, I am sitting there with a gray button, and need to change the HLS settings to match a particular hue of blue.  How do I do that?  I eyedropper the blue, and look at its HLS settings in the color palette.  The problem is, for example, that Saturation in the color palette goes not from 0-100, but from 0-255 ... so I cannot set the saturation in the HLS adjustment to match the blue, because the blue is set at 224. 

So basically I'm saying that the HLS adjustment/colorize screen does not give me a way to match the HLS values from the color palette.

 

One thing that comes to mind is that you mention a gray button.  There are several factors.  A B&W (graytone) picture may have the Saturation set to 0.  You can't change the color if it has no saturation but only H and L.   The other thing is that some pictures have the paletts reduce to lower color ranges like 256 colors to reduce the size of the file.  Be sure to check that and change to a higher palette value 64K or 16 Million before trying to change the color.  You will need to use a photo program for this.

Ron

Hi. Perhaps gray was a bad example, but yes, they are the same color setting. Again, the problem is:

1. The control used to sample the original color presents saturation as a 0-255 setting

2. The control used to set the new color presents saturation as a 0-100% setting.

Here are the HSL values for pure blue (RGB 0 0 255) in the Eye Dropper control: H=170  S=255  L=128

In the HSL colorize tool, it is H=210  Saturation=92  Lightness=0

 
So...starting with something blue, and measuring 170/255/128... how am I to make another object the same exact color using the HSL tool, if I don't know that IT thinks the color is 210/92/0?
 

I understand your problem better now thanks to your more detailed explanation - I still think it would be far easier to do in paint shop pro, after all painter essentials is primarily designed for turning a photo into a painting, or drawing by hand, but is a simplified programme and you are asking rather a lot of it to do web graphics, whereas psp is designed for that very purpose. Personally I would start with a grey scale bump map type image on a transparent background, and then using the colourize button in psp you could change your picture to virtually any colour you wanted, even adding saturation, contrast, brightness, whatever, and this way you could build up a collection of identical buttons, and just cut and paste them from your own files. It is either not possible or very difficult to do everything in one programme, but two programmes used together can take you onto another level.

Ah, well... I actually *am* talking about PaintShop Pro... version X ...guess I ended up in the wrong forum, but the difference in the scales of HSL in the palette and the HSL colorize are what I find.