forcing a colour scheme in photoshop?

condra

I'm hoping this isn't a dumb/weird question.

I've seen photographs/collections where the colors work so well together, that they simply must have been tweaked cleverly in post. I'm not talking only of items that were designed with color schemes in mind, but various unrelated items, working in perfect harmony in obvious triadic or complimentary (etc) schemes of one type or another.

I'm wondering if there is a way to quickly force the color gamut of a photo to gradually conform to separating into a scheme. This may involve, as a very crude example, reds moving towards orange, while blues might move (in the other direction) towards green.

I've experimented with this and Photoshops "match color" feature doesn't come close. Selective color adjustments using masks and referencing a specific color scheme from kuler is so far the only way I can achieve this.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Feathers

I think it'll be hard to do this nicely without manual intervention — are you sure that the site you saw it on was automated for the photo recolouring?

As you say, maybe you could apply a series of effects, such as desaturating the image slightly & then blending in another layer on top that applies a tint of the colour scheme.

I think to do it effectively though, you've have to analyse what the base colour is to begin with, to know how best to adjust the image. Sounds like a lot of work!