Making dark areas lighter on a wood texture

Question

I'm trying to find a method to make a wood texture more homogeneous in Photoshop. What's the best approach to achieve this? (I only found tutorials that deal with photos, not textures).

I want the dark grey areas to be more closer in color tone and brightness like the lighter brown areas. This seems difficult on such an image but I think it can be done.

Answer 1

You can use the Dodge Tool, set at a low exposure - like 10% (located on the Control bar) - to brush over the dark areas lightly. Do this a few times until you bring them up to around the same value as the rest. They will turn slightly more grey than brown. That's fine. Focus on value and getting the contrast to the same relative area as the other parts of the image.

After the Dodge Tool .....

Then to combat the hue variations, I'd add a new layer, pick a basic brown color from the image and fill the new layer with the brown. Set this new layer's blending mode to Color and drop the opacity until you get something desireable.

The more opaque the color layer is the more uniform the image becomes.

Answer 2

Obviously the wanted general wood color is well visible only in few places, others are grey or too dark. A quick check in LAB color mode shows clearly the fully grey areas, which will not get any color otherwise than by adding it:

One way out:

1. Make a new layer and fill it with the wanted color; pick it from a light point and use the paint bucket

2. Make a copy of the image layer. Apply to it Highpass filter to bring up the local brightness variations. Find a radius which kills large area variations, but saves the texture. No matter if the color vanishes:

3. Move the original layer to top, but keep it closed temporarily to see the others. Give to the picked base color layer blending mode=color. The high pass filtered version gets it. Add a Curves layer to stretch the tone range of the filtered layer:

4. Find a good mix with the original by adjusting the opacity of the original layer:

A lot of variation is available by inserting an adjustment layer that affects to the original image, There's the "next layer only" switch, click it ON. Possible adj layers for this to try:

• Hue/Saturation
• Curves

Here's an example with the curves layer:

The opacity of the original layer is adjusted higher because it's now not as dark as it initially was.

Answer 3

The Curves tool is your friend!

When it comes to tonal range, the sledgehammer is always the scary "curves" tool.

Below I applied two adjustment layers. The first curves layer (radically) evens out the tonal range (you can adjust this of course, and as a bonus it's non-destructive, and repeatable) and then a hue/saturation layer to add back colour.

Of course varying the blend modes and capacities of these two adjustment layers allows further fine tuning.