Changing background

[crockny]

Hi - I'm happy with the dragonfly and vegetation but hate the background - harsh green and globs -- in another version I was able to deal with the white and dark globs but my efforts to change the color of the background have been tedious to say the least. It looks better if it's a lighter blue ... how would you proceed with this?

[Doug Sundseth]

You can selectively change colors in PS using a Hue/Saturation layer and picking the range of colors affected by the color shift.

[crockny]

Well I tried that but I guess I don't know what I'm doing. I tried changing the green channel but it changed the dragonfly and seedpod as well. I tried choosing the background with the eyedropper including the green and yellow shades and it changed a lot of other stuff too and I can't figure out how to subtract what I don't want changed ...

[Doug Sundseth]

With CS5, when you have a Hue/Saturation layer open, you have a couple of rainbow bands at the bottom of the control panel. Between those bands are controls for the range of colors that will be affected. There are four controls in all, one for each edge of the full effect of the layer and one for the edge of the effect. (The effect is graduated across the frequencies.

You can tune the effect fairly tightly, and if necessary, you can mask out the effect on whatever doesn't need to be affected. (I don't guarantee an easy result, of course, especially because you have translucencies that are tough to deal with.)

[fayf]

If the hue-saturation really isn't working you can do it the basic way - select the bee and flower (should be easy to do since they're so stark) and reverse selection, insert a new background layer.