Which enhancement tool is used to subtly change the color saturation of an area in photoshop Cs2?

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A friend, Marcia Hart, showed me this image she shot in Mexico. She wanted to change the color of the shirt to something that looked a bit more rustic. How do you change the color without affecting the underlying tonalities of the folds in the fabric.

As with everything in Adobe Photoshop there are several ways to do this, but my favorite is the one I think is the simplest. If I select the shirt I can then use that selection to mask a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer set to Colorize. I like this method because the mask (the selection) can be tweaked to perfection after the adjustment is made, and the adjustment itself can also be tweaked at any time because it is on a separate layer above the image itself.

I love that kind of flexibility because I often want to make small changes when I go back and look at an image some time after the initial work. I'm using the brand-new (and wonderful!) Adobe Photoshop CS3. You can use earlier versions of Photoshop and you may be able to use a different image editor, but you'll need one that allows adjustment layers with layer masks.

Of course menus will be different in different programs and versions, and I'm speaking Windows here. If you use a Mac substitute Cmd for Ctrl and Option for Alt. Marcia had already done the basic adjustments to the image so I opened it in Photoshop and went to work selecting the shirt.

Before CS3 I would have first tried the Magic Wand tool, then polished the selection in Quick Mask mode. If the Magic Wand wouldn’t isolate the area well, I would have used my favorite method of painting the selection directly in Quick Mask mode which I discussed in the tutorial "Virtual Fill Flash" and which I have used in many of the tutorials here). But CS3 has a wonderful new Quick Selection tool.

It worked very well for this image because the shirt is tonally distinct from the areas surrounding it. It is found in the Toolbar below the Lasso tool if you use the single-column layout. Some tools have associated similar tools, as shown by a small black triangle in the lower right of the tool's box.

Just click and hold on one of these tools for a second and the other options pop up. This is the case for the Quick Selection tool, which also allows you to choose the old Magic Wand tool. With the Quick Selection tool chosen, I simply scrubbed the cursor over the various tonal areas of the shirt.

I got most of the areas in one motion and then added others with subsequent scrubbing strokes. I didn't have to hold down Shift to add to the selection, as I did with the Magic Wand tool. If I selected an area I didn't want, I pressed Alt and scrubbed in it to un-select it.

This tool is more magic than the Magic Wand. When I had what looked like a good selection, I went to the top menu bar and chose Select > Refine Edge, which is also new in CS3, in order to slightly feather the edge of the selection so it will look natural. This new dialog combines into one box several refinements you commonly need to make to a selection.