# How to turn colour into white



## Hiace_Drifter (Apr 15, 2014)

I have a photo of my son on a beige sheet. Although converted to B&W, the beige sheet looks murky and would look much better if white. What is the best way to completely desaturate and lighten it? All I can think of is over exposing... but really I want to replace beige with white....

I have photoshop cs4 - is that a better option?


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## RikkFlohr (Apr 15, 2014)

White in Lightroom's adjustment brush is: + Exposure. Black is: - Exposure

PS may be a better option if the area is very complex to paint - otherwise I would likely do it in Lightroom.  If you have converted to Black and White already, there should be no need to desaturate as there is no color there.


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## siloxr (Apr 18, 2014)

neilp2000 said:


> I have a photo of my son on a beige sheet. Although converted to B&W, the beige sheet looks murky and would look much better if white. What is the best way to completely desaturate and lighten it? All I can think of is over exposing... but really I want to replace beige with white....
> 
> I have photoshop cs4 - is that a better option?


IMO, Photoshop is the much better choice for an edit of this nature.  The reason I say this is that there are far better selection and masking tools in Ps than Lightroom.  It might actually even be best if you were to revert back to the color version before you import over to Ps for editing because once you move over to grayscale, many of the tools (specifically the quick select tool and the magic wand) that look for certain color properties (such as luminance) might be fooled because where there where four channels of different information for them to lean on in color, they now essentially only have one.

Selections are one of the biggest pains to get right and what keeps a lot of people from really leveraging some of the neat things that Photoshop can do for them.  Masking is one of the better ways to get good selections.  One of the methods is using a quickmask:  http://www.sitepoint.com/better-selections-in-photoshop-with-quick-masks/
Here are some other methods of masking:  http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1332858

Here is a useful video showing some of these techniques and another few in a real retouching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec2Bbg13CFk  <--you would do something similar, but use this technique on the background and not your son.


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## Denis Pagé (Apr 18, 2014)

Already in B&W Neil?... In Develop right panel open the TSL section. On the left of that right panel use the little Target Adjustment Tool (we call it the TAT tool) for saturation, click a beige zone and drag down to desaturate and/or use the Luminance TAT click the dark beige zone and drag upward to increase the beige luminosity.

But take care of skin tones. If they are too close to the chosen beige tint, you may rather have to use the paintbrush right below the histogram and paint around with either exposure or luminance or both.


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