How to Identify an exact color within a photograph?

Question

I want to Identify the exact color of this image.

Is it possible, to calculate the difference in color of the dollar bill and the suit colors, to get the "original colors?

I want to create a spiderman suit, for that I want to use the exact colors from the real suit.

I figured, that it would probably be easiest, to somehow calculate the difference of the dollar bill color (because that should be normed) and the red.

Would it make sense to grade the whole picture so that the dollar bill green matches the "real " dollar bill green, or would that disturb the other colors?

Does it, or is there a smarter way?

Does it have to be taken in account, that the dollar bill is in some kind of a case. Color variation can be calculated from the difference in of the "white shades".

How would I do this? Or how else could I Identify exactly this color?

Answer 1

Well, you probably can not.

A first step would be to get the white balance properly.

On the "levels" panel (Ctrl+L), use the gray eyedropper, and touch what you think should be white.

But this basic step has already problems on your image because that paper is not white, neither the bill or the paper the bill is on. The paper is semi transparent, the light is not uniform... Etc.

But assuming we can have the basic white balance correctly, any attempt to find the right green is useless because the costume has no green. You need to find color references for the rest of the colors, which you do not have.

Take a look at this answer. https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/61491/do-i-always-get-the-same-colours-when-i-set-the-white-balance-correctly/61502#61502

A basic color reference has at least 18 colors.

Answer 2

They sell color analyzing devices that scan an item and tell you the color code. Alternately if you are able to open an image of the suit and bill in illustrator you can sample the color with the eye dropper tool and view the color codes.

You can take a photo of the suit and bill, open in illustrator and get the color code with the eye dropper tool, but there may be some error in getting the precise color caused by your phones exposure and color accuracy.

You can search the internet for "Spiderman suit color" and find what other people use.

If you have a digital image of the original packaging or ad copy that shows the suit you can open it in illustrator and do the eye dropper thing.

As a side note, myself and some other designers and printers prefer the hex color code. Its the one that sometimes uses a hash tag and then six numbers or letters: #667766. The Hex codes are transferable to CMYK and RGB and other color models, and are accurate between screen and print (as much as possible).

An internet search says U.S. bills use #85BB65 Green and Spiderman's suit is #A71814 Red, but this may not be the exact red you are trying to recreate.

Answer 3

Assuming there's only a nice color shift that does not peak some hue and desaturate another, you can try Photoshop's color matching.

• Get an image of one dollar that you believe to have the same colors as the other had when photographed.
• Crop the reference dollar to have nothing else
• Select the one dollar by polygonal lasso in the Spiderman's suit image
• Go to Image > Adjustments > color match
• Input he source to be the reference dollar without any selections on it
• Cross the output to be extended to the whole target image (=ignore selection)

Here's the result.

You really should have other data, too. This method assumes very much. Actually we have no proof that

• there is no complex color errors and
• we have a good reference photo of one dollar

The result seems somehow hazy. It's well possible that the reference dollar image is too flat. I have seen some that have much more contrast.

But the piece of cardboard under the dollat in the suit image seems to be grey. We can match that from the given image by opening that photo as camera raw in Photoshop or using some color cast removal plugin. There we point the cardboard as grey and fix the contrast and brightness to make the result fit in the available area (0...255).

The result:

I wouldn't believe this, because I remember the Spiderman to have quite much blue in his suit. Here it all is nearly black. Your photo has been taken in yellow or orage boosted light that makes blue much darker. It's against our primary presumption.

Cheap cameras that give out a heavily processed JPG just to hide how bad the image sensor is are not the right tool for color reproduction. A raw image capable camera is a minimum for this.

Answer 4

you can scan and then with a tool in photoshop have to select the color and then open in the color wheel and you can see the RGB or CMYK color that create the color of your pic.