Change the colour of clothes

Fabric that reads as one blue contains many blues: highlights, body tone, shadow, reflected light and compression noise. The dropper starts the description, while hue, chroma and lightness tolerances decide how much of that family belongs to the operation.

This opening arms the dropper and begins in absolute-replace mode because neutral clothing is a common case. For an already coloured garment, switch to hue shift to preserve more of its existing chroma and all of its lightness variation.

1. The engine selects values, not objects. A red bag and a red shirt in the same tonal range move together.
2. Very dark cloth has too little information to carry a bright believable result; a new hue cannot reconstruct missing folds.
3. Semi-transparent lace and motion-blurred edges contain background colour, so a broad tolerance may pull the surroundings into the mask.

Why does a white shirt work differently from a coloured one?

A coloured garment already carries hue through its folds, so hue shift can rotate that family while preserving lightness. White has almost no chroma and needs absolute replace to assign one.

Can it isolate the shirt from another object of the same colour?

No. Selection is based on perceptual colour values, not object recognition. If the background contains the same range, both regions are selected.

Why does black clothing barely take a bright colour?

Black fabric contains little recorded lightness or chroma. Writing a hue cannot create folds that were not captured, and absolute replacement can flatten the few tonal differences that remain.

• Replace a colourThe dropper armed on open, two swatches, one operation and nothing else to manage.
• Indexed PNG paletteRewrite PLTE colour definitions without touching compressed pixel indices.
• Recolouring neutral clothingThe chroma floor, why a white shirt is easy, and why a black one is not.
• The general remapperHue shift, absolute replace and a stack of operations that can be reordered and edited.