Photoshop: How to Remove a Certain Colour from an Image

Question

I am looking for a way to eliminate a colour from an image. I hope to achieve an effect similar to what you can do through Image -> Adjustments -> Black & White. In this, you can use the sliders to make a certain color register as black or white in the resulting colourless image, and if you then go through the Layer Style Blending Options you can remove either the black or white sections, making those areas transparent. Effectively, this allows you to 'cut out' entire chunks of certain colours, but it doesn't really help me since you are left with a black and white image. Does anyone know how to work around this?

EDIT:

I have found a way to do this, but it is not the most elegant solution. It seems like there should be a more 'automatic' way to do this in PS, so let me know if you know of one.

The solution I've found involves copying the image you want to remove a colour from onto a new layer. Then, with one of the layers, go through the Image -> Adjustments -> Black & White process as mentioned in the first post. Go into style blending options and remove either the white or black, and merge it with a blank layer. Then CTRL + click that layer to select everything, and apply it as a layer mask to the copied image (which should still be in colour).

As I said, this is a rather long way to achieve the desired effect and I'd appreciate a simpler method.

Answer 1

Magic Wand Method

Depending on the result you're looking for and the image you're working with you could potentially just use the magic wand and make sure the checkbox for Contiguous is unchecked, and just select the colour on the image you want to remove and it should select all areas with the colour and you can just click delete on the keyboard. You may need to mess with the Tolerance to get it as you like.

Colour Range Method (Credit goes to here for this one.)

You can use select>colour range and then again inkdrop the colour you want and then just delete the colour same as with the magic wand. As the answer I linked to said, using Shift when sampling the colours allows you to select a range of colours rather than one specific shade, and Alt can be used to remove colours from the range, which I think is easier to control than the tolerance in the magic wand method.

Answer 2

The Gimp photo efitor has a tool that exchanges evert pixel in an image with pivels of any color and/or transparency you choose. At the outset avter you choose the doomed pixel whose color will be bannished from the photo, tou get to adjust how how closely in color other pixels must be to be also be removed. A very cloe match and only a half dozen pixelsare replaced. A broad match and all the pixels get replaced. Or you can pick a mask ro include or exclude from this sort of pixel holocaust. It also works in anigifs where you can replce colors in simgle frames orall the frames or some frames of the gif