The only reason for choosing this envelope is the delightful orange background. This first view is the entire envelope.
The first step is to crop it down to just the engraving as in the second view.
Now comes the removal of the background. The challenge here is the darkness of the hue. This places it close to the black in the engraving so that simply following the techniques presented in class for abstracting an engraving would result in removing a good deal of the image as well as the background. Desaturating won’t help because it turns the orange to a dark grey and one would still loose part of the image. The trick is to use the replace color window under the “image/adjustment” menu.
- When the window opens select the image radio button.
- Then using the left most of the three eyedropers on the right side of the window select the orange out of the original image.
- Next move the lightness slider all the way to the right so that +100 shows in the lightness value box.
- Click OK and proceed as was described in class to abstract the image from the background.
- This gives us view three.
As a test I changed the color of the background layer to a green to see if any specks of orange still remained. This is view four.
