Need help changing the background of an image

I recently tried to change the background colour of a logo I created a couple years ago, only to find out it isn't an easy process due to having lost the original Photoshop files with layers.

Is there anyone out there who is a more talented artist than I'm and could help me turn the background from white to gray without sacrificing the whites anyhwere else?

Here's the picture:

<img src="http://s24.postimg.org/lu7pt00wl/HHHHHH3.png" border="0" />

And here's what it's supposed to look like (minus the weird white borders)

<img src="http://s28.postimg.org/8wo3q0bjh/HHHHHH6.png" border="0" />

Sorry dude, but your logo has bad quality and is way to detailed to be rescued in a good quality without loosing lots of details.

Tried to get the inside of the squirrel free, using some transparencies, but that?s just semi-good i guess.

here

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/7AlfW1y.jpg" border="0" />

so he actually wants this shadows? :-D

Yea. I do.

Thing is, the pic Fidasx posted has the ferret's fill colour in gray. I could get there myself, since it only requires one to replace white with gray. What I would like to have is a gray background with the ferret's fill colour remaining the way it is.

Just thought it would be a nice contrast to a gray background. It seems very difficult to pull off though.

In essence, it should look just like that second pic I posted. Only without the white borders around the shadow areas and the whiskers changed to black. The later I can do myself, the former is hard though.

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7134196/ferret.png" border="0" />

Awesome! Many thanks. This is exactly what I wanted.

The paw symbol should also retain the white highlights (forgot to mention that) and the right ear (those few pixels on the outmost top of the ferret's head) is grayed in that image. But it's only a few pixels, so I can change this on my own.

Care to post a little tutorial on how you did it? I'm sure I'm not the only one running into this sort of problem.

first manually drew a selection on your first image , with the desired white colors, trying to stay as much within the black outlines as possible, and copied that to sepeprate transparent image.

(was bit of haste job, henche the missing pixels lol)

This gave me the ferret with inner colors of your desired final result.

I think I then did the same fidasx did (masked original image with white background to remove white background), but then copy pasted the first image I made over that, keeping it within the black lines, retaining all the nice shadow effects from the masked image.

2 minutes

Its a bit of a bastards approach :) but worked smooth

Nice. Thanks for the quick tutorial.

I still don't really understand the masking bit, unfortunately.

Like I just decided to add some more words (the logo will actually represent my small video game brand, in case someone is wondering what this is about). How would I mask these with the same gray background from before?

<img src="http://s12.postimg.org/kulgalirh/Letters3.png" border="0" />

Sorry to be that bothersome. Image editing just isn't my kind of thing (yet), hence I still need to learn a lot.

EDIT: I tried masking it and ended up with translucent letters. Obviously doing something wrong.

I use an option called create mask from source by source luminance, and i invert the mask data.

I think in your last method, you only needed to invert the mask data.

:)

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7134196/ferret1.png" border="0" />

Nope. Still doesn't work. Looks all sorts of funny, but I can't get the right combination.

EDIT: Just saw your edit. Thanks for the help. Just adding it to my logo. In the future, I'll make sure to stick to one single graphics editing tool and to use layers at all times :)

EDIT2: Just pieced it all together

<img src="http://s28.postimg.org/ez06vmnvx/Logo_B.png" border="0" />

Good work lennaert :)

I think I'm going to try and scale this to credit card measures. Getting a new CC next month and still hadn't decided on the custom image. Until now, that is.

Looks great ^_^

I use a bit of an older version of jasc paintshop 7, only 30mb, but been my loyal assistent for over 10 years ... I'll take it any day over modern paintshops.

Looks great ^_^

I use a bit of an older version of jasc paintshop 7, only 30mb, but been my loyal assistent for over 10 years ... I'll take it any day over modern paintshops.

The only two tools I ever felt comfortable with were Twisted Brush (it has this awesome filling mechanic where you can actually decide the radius of the filling by holding the mousebutton) and Corel Draw 11.

Twisted Brush did, unfortunately, not work well with this image and I don't know where I left my Corel Draw serial.

Anyways. Just found my original image. Turns out, it was way bigger (the one on here was just a Twitter avatar, it seems) and I managed to keep the layers somewhat seperate.

When I opened the file in GIMP, it was masked pretty well and there were only a few parts (the snout, the tail and some of the a's and e's) I had to fill in manually.

The letters look weird when I carve them on a gray background, so I'll still have to manually add them.

Getting one's logo onto a credit card is a huge PITA, btw. The logo on here has just the right size but easily blurs out and the original one is sharp but way too big.

hehe, with some tools you find an approach or have ease of use you cant with others :)

great you found the original, you probably need to test various resizer methods to find the one right to make it a decent small size.

while working I tend to work with a 200% model and when done resize it to 50%, smooths out everything nicely in most cases for me :)