Change black clothes into white

Question

I have a photo of a man wearing a black shirt. I'd like to change the shirt to become white.

I have tried using a Color Overlay but it looks "Photoshopped".

Any alternative methods will be appreciated.

Answer 1

To change any color in a defined region we need to make a selection of the area of interest first. This can be done automatically with a selection tool that works best for the source but you will always get best results on a manual selection.

After a slight feathering of the selection we can adjust the colors within the selection freely. For changing a black (which in fact was grey) source to white with preserving shadows I adjusted the color curve to light up both, dark and bright areas.

The example above suffers from its tiny orginal size, from compression artifacts, and from my sloppiness on making the selection. Better result can be obtained by using a high-resolution uncompressed original.

Answer 2

I haven't tried, but what I can think of is using the magic wand to select the different sectors of the shirt, make new layers from them, and using the color overlay. However, each different part will need a different shade of color, to emulate the wrinkles.