Trying to change a part of a sweater using hue/saturation

Question

So I already did part of the guy's sweater using color balance and a layer mask, but I forgot how I did it exactly. I see I left a small part of his sweater not done yet, between his hands. So it was green and now I'm trying to change all of it so it stand out more from the background of the trees. I should be able to just use the pen tool to pick out what part I want to change and then do a layer mask, but I must be doing something wrong. Do I need marching ants or something before doing a layer mask?

Answer 1

If you ask me, you are splitting hair; the image is at 315% enlargement and the area that is missing is hard to see, very hard. That said, the sweater should be relatively easy to select with the quick select tool. Here is what I will suggest:

1. Target the top most layer, then press Shift-Ctrl-Alt-E to create a merged layer
2. On this layer, apply the Quick Select tool and from what I can see it should select most of the sweater
3. For extra selections, hold the Alt key down and using the lasso tool (I prefer the polygon lasso tool) select the area to remove
4. For the parts that are not selected, hold the Shift key down and use the lasso tool to add the areas one at a time
5. When you have the sweater selected, you can either go the route of "Refine Selection" and fix it further, or create a mask and Refine Mask to fit
6. Now that you have a mask, save it as an Alpha channel
7. Delete this layer you created in step 1 and add a new adjustment layer "Solid Color" pick red, don't worry you will change it later
8. Make sure the selection is loaded by Ctrl-Clicking on the Alpha channel
9. Come back to the layers palette, target the red layer, add a layer mask. The area of the sweater should be flat red
10. Change the blend mode of this layer to first Hue and see if it is affecting it in any appreciable way. If not, change the blend mode to Color
11. You should now see the color change in the sweater. Since it is a dark area the color change will result in a dark shade of what you select, forget bright yellow or sky blue
12. To change the color of the layer, and the sweater, double click on the color layer to bring up the color selector, now pick the hue and saturation you want as you watch the sweater change color.

Answer 2

Thanks for the help and the feedback! I read all the comments and the issue I had was using the pen tool instead of using a mask. I ended up using the quick mask mode then once I had a certain part of the sweater selected I was able to use hue/saturation and created a color balance layer and changed the color of that selection. Thanks again for the help.