Expert: Neal Ziring - 10/7/2003

Question
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-10/423196/hello.jpg

hi...this link points to a sample of my handwriting...all i want to do is change the color of the background to dark blue, and the color of the writing to white...how can i do this using photo-paint?  "Replace Colors" didn't give me a very good result.  i don't know what else to do...thanks a lot,

jason.

Answer
Jason,

 There are a couple of ways to approach this in Corel
Photo-Paint, but "replace colors" is not likely to work
very well.

 First, your image is a little too low-res to really
work well.  The text has some jaggy-looking edges.
So, I think the best technique to use would be color
masking.  I followed the steps listed below and it
worked fine.

    0. Invert the image -- this makes the background
       black and the writing light gray -- so it is a
       little closer to what you want.
    1. Select Mask->None to clear the mask.
    2. Select Mask->Color mask..  and the color mask
       window will pop up.
    3. In the color mask window, select just one
       color, black, and set a tolerance of about 10
       to 15.  Then click OK.
    4. On the main toolbar, pick the Rectangle tool (F6).
    5. Set a fill color of dark blue (possibly by using
       the color palette)
    6. Make sure that the 'Render to Object' button is
       not selected.
    7. Draw a rectangle over the whole image, or the area
       that you want to appear dark blue.
    8. Invert the mask using Mask->Invert.
    9. Set a fill color of white.
    10. Draw a rectangle over the area with the handwriting
    11. Select Mask->None to clear the mask.
    12. Select the Crop tool and crop as needed.

And that's it!  This approach works well for colorizing
any scanned B&W image, but higher-res sources will almost
always look nicer.

Hope this helps...

...nz