A garment is a family of colours
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.
Where colour selection stops
- The engine selects values, not objects. A red bag and a red shirt in the same tonal range move together until you separate them with the region brush.
- Very dark cloth has too little information to carry a bright believable result; a new hue cannot reconstruct missing folds.
- Semi-transparent lace and motion-blurred edges contain background colour, so a broad tolerance may pull the surroundings into the mask.
Questions about clothing
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?
Yes. Open the Regions panel and paint “only here” over the shirt, or “not here” over the other object; the colour selection is intersected with what you painted. The strokes are stored as shapes and redrawn at full size on export.
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.
Which mode for which cloth
| Garment | Mode | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Coloured cloth | Hue shift | keeps the dye's own variation and every fold |
| White or grey cloth | Absolute replace | there is no hue to rotate, so one is assigned |
| Black cloth | Deep shades only | too little lightness range to carry a bright colour |
| Prints and patterns | One colour of the print at a time | each print colour is its own selection |
| Lace, motion blur | Expect background in the mask | the edge pixels are part background |
Skin-like protection is on by default here, and the Regions panel offers an on-device person finder: switch it to “only on the person” and a same-coloured background stays out without any painting.
Identity photographs such as passport photos must be unaltered. Do not use a recolour on a photo you will submit as ID.
Related colour workflows
- Colour variantsFour to eight colourways from one selection, or one per brand colour, saved as a ZIP.
- Batch recolourLand a folder on one colour with a per-file solved shift, flag outliers, save a ZIP and a receipt.
- Change hair colourPaint over the hair first, then shift its hue with every strand's light and shadow kept.
- Recolouring neutral clothingThe chroma floor, why a white shirt is easy, and why a black one is not.
- Same colour, two objectsWhy a colour selection cannot tell a blue jacket from a blue sky, and what a region does.