How To Change Colors In Photoshop - 3 Ways To Select And Change ANY Color

today we're going to talk about the easiest methods to change any color in your photo using Photoshop so let's get started what's happening guys my name's Brennan from B will create about calm home to editing tutorials can read your reviews tricks and tips to make photography and photo editing a whole lot easier so if that sounds like something that you'd be in tooth and make sure to hit that subscribe button to stay up to date with more videos just like today so just as the title says we are going to be talking about some great ways to change color using Photoshop so in this tutorial we're going to be talking about the hue/saturation adjustment layer and all of the amazing ways that you can use this tool to change your colors in Photoshop I'm going to show you a bunch of different methods that will work for different images and different scenarios so you can pick whichever one works best for you after we go through the hue/saturation adjustment layer I'll dive into how to change white into any specific color since you can't really do that with the hue/saturation adjustment tool so with that let's hop into the computer and start learning how to change colors in Photoshop okay so the first image that we're going to be using today is this image of this girl with a pink toque blue background a couple very basic colors so it's going to be a perfect example to showcase the hue/saturation adjustment tool and how it works so you can access the hue/saturation adjustment tool by clicking right here on the hue/saturation adjustment tool icon or you can click down here on the half circle and go up here to hue/saturation whichever method works for you once you click on that you'll have a new layer that pops out the hue/saturation adjustment layer and you'll also have a new dialog box which has all of the settings for this tool so immediately when you open this tool you'll be greeted by the master tab and that tab controls all of the colors in your photo so for example if I go to my hue slider here in my masters tab look at what happens to my photo all of the colors change in the image her skin the background the toque her shirt all of that stuff changes so maybe that's what you want to do maybe you want to affect the colors of your whole image then the master tab is gonna work great for you but you're likely wanting to select something more specific than that so for our first example let's go and try to change the background of this photo let's say I want to change it to a different hue of blue or maybe a different color altogether so obviously we can't do that in the master tab because that is the tab that affects our whole photo and the hue of all our colors in the image so if I click here on the master tab a drop down menu will come and there's a whole bunch of other color options here so you can click on any of these they all look the same but for this example I'm gonna go down to blues because that's likely where the background is going to be sitting in so I'll click on blues and I'm going to go ahead and just try to change the hue of my image so now notice how I change my hue and not a lot is happening in my photo not even the background is really changing so at this point you might be a little bit confused thinking while I'm in the blues tab so why is it not changing colors and that's because maybe you're not quite in the right color range I'm gonna show you what I mean here so if you ever are in a situation like this where you think you're trying to change one color in this case blue and I go to change the hue it's not really working out for me nothing's happening we can go down to this saturation slider and boost it to 100% and now look what happens to our photo you see how there's this weird banding that goes around this really saturated blue all around in certain spots of our photo so that is showing us exactly what's being affected in that color tab so in this case our blues tab is only affecting these very saturated areas so that goes to show that we're not in the right color range so I'll open back up my hue/saturation adjustment go to my blues and I'll just reset the saturation back to zero by double clicking on the saturation word and it goes back to zero so now let's try my sans instead so I'll go blues to scions now let's bump up the saturation to see if we're in the right area I'll click and drag up my saturation once again and notice how the entire background now becomes very saturated so that means we're in the perfect color range to affect our background if we look over here on her sweater we see a little bit of blue is leaking over so that means that this area is also being affected by this color Channel in this case there's just a little bit of the color reflecting off of the background onto her sweater so that's going to be OK for us because if we change the hue of the background we also want the hue of that reflection to change as well so I'm going to double click my saturation word to set it back to zero now I'll just go up to my hue slider and I can go ahead and change the color of my background so I can slide it one way I can slide it the other notice how it changes color of course now I know what you're thinking you're probably saying this color-changing technique doesn't even work for me well don't worry we still got three more to go so don't hit that dislike button coat yet I have a lot more to show you so now that we have figured out that we can change the color of our background just quickly by using the hue slider this is the easiest and most straightforward basic explanation of how to change a color in Photoshop using the hue/saturation adjustment layer now let's go into a little bit more specific ways of doing things so now this time let's say I want to affect the toque so I'm going to go up here to my Reds Channel and I'm going to boost up that saturation see what's being affected and now you see that we have a bit of a problem I want to be affecting the tube but I don't want to affect the color of her skin or her sweater so watch what happens if I change the hue currently her skin changes color along with the toque of course you could just go and mask all of that out but that's a little bit annoying and kind of a lot of work so what's a better way to go about this on all of your color channels there's going to be this slider down here and this slider is selecting the color range that your hue sits in so in this case for our Reds notice how our slider sits within the Reds of our total color palette whatever you'd like to call this in really basic terms I'll just boost my saturation up so you can see that's very clearly if I click and drag the slider over watch how the colors in my image begin to change the areas that are saturated 100% or the areas that are being affected begin to change as I change the slider so now as I go over into the greens there's not many greens in my photos so it's only really affecting this bottom area around here if I go over the opposite way I go over into the blues and now all of a sudden I'm selecting the background the same as my scions were so this slider is a really key way to isolate specific color ranges within a color inch so for example we were just in our reds so let's set that back to red here and I want to get rid of this skin tone I just want to select this kind of red I don't want to affect the red upper skin so if I click on these little sliders on the outside I can drag them out we can drag them back in and notice as I drag them towards the inside away from the Reds it starts to get rid of the red of her skin I can even drag this over completely to isolate it even better so now only our took is being selected a bit of her lips but that's no problem we can just mask that out it's a lot easier to mask out her lips than her whole face so now that we have adjusted our color range things are looking pretty good here I can double click on my saturation and set it back to zero I'm gonna go to my hue slider and now we can change the color of our toque so I can change this to pretty much whatever I want in this case whatever floats your boat you don't want to go too crazy with it of course because things might look a little weird but you can also bring down the saturation and things will start to look better for you so in this case I want to go for a nice brown kind of orange color you can even darken it up if you like and that looks really good to me and so of course I don't want to have her lips being affected so I can just click on the hue/saturation adjustment layer mask grab my brush tool make sure I'm painting black onto this layer mask and I can just paint over her lips and now her lips are back to the normal color now let's zoom in a little more and see what else is going on now in this example you see how the bit of the shadow has changed color as well underneath or tuch so you might want to go in and either adjust the color range specifically within your hue/saturation adjustment layer so in this case we maybe want to do some little bits of adjustments in here like that and now that gets rid of it for us or you can just go through with a black brush and mask that area out whatever works best for you in your opinion so now with that if I turn that layer on and off we have successfully changed the color from a bright pink to a neutral Brown pretty quickly very easily and not a lot of work not any manual cutting out extra labor things that are annoying and difficult to do in Photoshop sometimes so now let's get even more specific with our color selections I'm going to reset everything back to zero so another great way to change the color of anything in your photo is to use a feature called colorize which basically puts a single color over your whole photo so you don't have to deal with any weird changes in hue or things like that where the hue/saturation adjustment slider as itself sometimes will struggle with so using the colorize feature and having a selection that's directly being affected will definitely help with your color changing effects so I'm going to show you exactly how to do that so for this example I'm going to just duplicate my background layer so I have a separate example here I'll call this two example two so in Photoshop there's this really cool feature that maybe you haven't heard of before but it's called select color range so you can actually go and pick a specific color range in your photo and make it into a selection it's really cool the way to access this tools just go up to select and down here to color range now once you've selected that you'll probably see something like this you'll have you'll have your color range dialog box you'll have a fuzziness slider or range and you'll have this weird black and white looking thing here so this here is an example of what your layer mask looks like so remember white is 100% visible black is 100% transparent so if you look at this currently all of my background is selected so in this colorized example I actually do want to affect my background but you likely will not have a perfect selection like this right now so you'll probably see something like this it'll be sort of random there won't be anything properly selected so right away when you open this color range tool you'll have your eyedropper tool selected and you can click in a color range and it will turn that into a sample so again all the white areas are selected anywhere that it's black is transparent now of course if I click around it's going to change completely so how can we get all of the colors that we want into our one selection luckily for us is really easy because we have these two other eyedropper tool options here so we have one with the plus and one with the minus now if you want to quickly access these eyedropper tools you can hold shift to add on a eyedropper selection which in this case if you look at my cursor and holding shift has a plus or I can hold alt or option and it will take away from that sample so whichever one you'd like to do you can also just click on these eyedropper tools themselves whatever works better for you in this case I'll just click on my plus icon here and now we can click around and continue to add certain areas on to my selection you can even click and drag around to add things on really quickly so it looks great to me I'll add more over here dragging all around my image even down in this area and then sometimes this little preview box isn't quite enough so you can go to selection preview change it from none go to here to grayscale and now you're going to see exactly what your layer mask will look like so now I know that I need to add a little bit down in this area I want to add get rid of some of this banding go up in here and that is about as good as we're gonna get it right now so now we can go and change the fuzziness slider which is basically the tolerance of what we want selected so I can increase this fuzziness and it's going to select more there's going to be a little bit more tolerance of what will be selected things that are in a similar color range to this blue that we've been selecting so in this case I'll bring the fuzziness up just a little bit maybe around 50 and so I'm gonna get some nice selections around the outside of her furry jacket and there - canned things like that so that looks great to me and then I'll go ahead and click OK once I click OK I'll have a selection that's active represented by these marching ants and I want to add this onto a huge saturation adjustment layer so I can click right here on my hue/saturation adjustment layer once again and that selection gets automatically added on to our layer mask so now if I go to my master slider it's only going to affect the background but what I want to do now is not just change this hue but I want to add a general color over my whole background so I'll click this little tab right here that says colorize I'll click on that and now whatever color I pick it's going to be a solid color just like that so in this case maybe I want to change it to like a nice green color I can increase the saturation if I'd like whatever works for you but the benefit to using the colorize feature is that it won't have any weird banding when you really push the hue of the color like we did earlier changing the background color just with our simple sliders so now I can really go in any direction and there's no banding the background looks really really nice if you end up having any weird bits left over you can just go back and adjust the fuzziness of your selection maybe add a few more things to your sample with the select color feature if you do run into that issue it's just a little bit of refining you can even directly affect this layer mask paint things in or out if you wish in this case things are looking pretty much fine to me I could go and adjust things a little better so it affects less of her hair or I could go through and paint the outside of this to Kin and things like that but for the sake of this tutorial and to keep things moving along I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it because you now know how to make those selections with your color range and you know how to paint onto a layer mask with your brush tool so again just clicking colorize and they can change the hue you can saturation and you can even change the lightness or darkness of that color so colorize is a great feature you can change the colors of shirts tooks skin color background color sky whatever it really works amazing okay so now that we're starting to get the hang of the hue/saturation adjustment tool and colorize and some great methods to make selections around your colors now let's go into another image and discuss the problems with changing the color of white and a way to work around it so you can change white into any specific color you wish so over here in our other image we have a white t-shirt and once again I'm gonna grab my hue/saturation adjustment layer just like before I'll just play around with my master slider and notice this time how all the colors change just like before because we're affecting all the hues except this time the white is not changing at all because the white shirt doesn't have any color it doesn't have any hues to change it's just white so that is going to be a little bit of an issue for us even if I went ahead and clicked colorize the white color still stays pretty much white some of the shadows change a bit but for the most part the white is still remaining white it's not changing into a specific color say we want to turn the shirt into a red there's absolutely no way that that is going to pass off as red it still looks like a white shirt just now with red shadows so how can we go about changing the color white into a specific color so that's going to bring us into our final color changing method in Photoshop so I'm going to just quickly delete this hue/saturation adjustment layer what we need to do now is add a color fill layer over top of our white t-shirt in this case we want to select the color of our t-shirt and we can do that very easily just like before in a previous image using our color range tool so I'm going to go up here to select down here to color range and now we have our dialog box open up once again I'm going to leave my selection set to grayscale so I can really see what is going on in my photo the fuzziness I'll just leave as is and we can adjust it later on so I'm going to click once to sample the basic area so that's now our general selection and of course this needs a bit of refining to add in some of these shadowed areas that are still part of our t-shirt so I'll just zoom in here I'm going to hold shift to add in to my selection I can just can drag along here clicking and dragging along I'll make sure to add in a little bit of this area here I'll make sure to add in this dark area up here as best as I can and I don't want everything back here to be selected and it's likely because my fuzziness is set so high so I'm gonna drop my fuzziness down a little so it's gonna darken out that background and really just isolate our t-shirt so that looks better to me already holding shift adding even more to our selection here on the white t-shirt and notice how well even selects the little fuzzy bits around her shirt the color range tool does a really great job at this kind of stuff so for the most part this looks very good to me except I don't want all of this to be gray which is kind of like 50% visible so I'm going to hold alt or option now I have the minus eyedropper tool so I'm going to click on that it's going to get rid of that from my selection so now that's looking a lot better to me it can maybe click down here take some of that out and now we're starting to have a really nice selection of our t-shirt because remember white is gonna be visible black is gonna be transparent so with that I'm gonna leave my fuzziness set here maybe I'll play around with it just a little now in this case I think right around 30 looks really good and I'll click OK now we're gonna once again have a selection around the color range that we were just sampling and things and I'm going to add that on to a new color fill layer so to add a new color fill layer we can go up to layer down here to new fill layer and solid color now I'll just leave this as color fill one opacity 100% and I'll leave my mode at normal for now click OK and now we can go ahead and pick a specific color that we'd like to change our shirt to so for this example let's change it to a red color like I was talking about before something nice like this click OK so now we have a red t-shirt but it doesn't really look like a red t-shirt it's kind of just looks like this red brick on the outside of our shirt so that doesn't look very good so now we have to change the blend mode of this layer so selecting my color fill layer go to my layer blending mode click go down here to multiply and that's going to add in all the luminance values the brightness and the darkness aka the highlights and the shadows from our t-shirt and have them show through that color so now look how great that t-shirt is looking for us so I might have to go in here and just maybe adjust a little bit of her shoulder maybe a little bit around here so I'll click on my layer mask grab my brush tool making sure I'm painting white to add things back in and I'm just going to click and paint along her shoulder here fill all that good stuff in and now with that we have a pretty good selection of our whole t-shirt here there's a little bit of stuff going on around the outside of her arm we can double check this by viewing our layer mask holding alt or option clicking on that layer mask we can see the areas that are still being affected that we don't want so I'll grab my brush tool painting black and I'll just paint out the areas around the outside of our arm here paint out her pocket okay and now that's looking really nice to me hold alt or option click on that layer mask once again and now with that we've successfully changed the color of our white t-shirt using a color fill layer now I can double click on this color fill layer I can change this t-shirt color to anything I'd like it really doesn't matter I can have it a nice blue maybe like a nice cyan color something trendy and whatever the cool kids wear these days by using a color fill layer and having a really nice selection that we got with the color range selection tool you can pretty much change your image into any color you want so that's a really great trick to turn white into any color you'd like now once you set it to a specific color you can even add a hue/saturation adjustment layer on top of that to have even more control so with this color fill layer we'll add a hue/saturation adjustment layer I'm gonna create a clipping mask to that layer by clicking this little icon here now our hue/saturation will only affect this color fill layer and if I click colorize I can now just go and change the hue I can change the saturation and I can even change the darkness of that shirt so this even gives you more control over the color rather than just having the color palette to drag around on if you prefer using sliders and you can do do it with this method add a color fill layer and clip your hue/saturation adjustment layer to it and all the color-changing magic that you wish to do will be possible alright guys so I know that was a ton of information but those are the best ways to change any color in your photo using Photoshop so with the methods that we talked about in today's tutorial you can change any of the colors in your photo no matter the situation each option will have its own benefits and I think it just takes a bit of time and practice to realize which ones are gonna be best for which situations personally I really love using that colorize feature from changing anything on clothing and I love to use just the basic hue sliders if I want to do an overall adjustment to my full image now if you enjoyed today's tutorial make sure to hit that subscribe button to stay up-to-date with more great videos just like today's and of course please hit that like button as it really does make a difference if you have any burning questions about today's video or you have any future suggestions for tutorials then make sure to leave a comment down below also if you want to keep the photoshop & photography learning going then make sure to click up here for my most recent article on bebo creative comm and make sure to subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date with more tutorials and great photography tips straight to your inbox every week you can sign up and get my free ebook directly to your inbox right now by signing up via the link in the description below anyways guys that's all I have for you for today I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on changing any color in your image with Photoshop my name is Brendan from Buell creative economy could find me on instagram at burn wells and with that I'll catch you back here next time [Music]

Channel: Brendan Williams

Views: 22,074

Keywords: how to change a color in photoshop, select and change colors, edit colors, photoshop, how to change white in photoshop, how to change the colour of white, brendan williams, brnwills, brendan photography, change any color, replace color, change color in photoshop, how to change the color of anything in photoshop, selecting colours in photoshop, replace colors in a photo, swap colors in photoshop, how to select and change colors in photoshop, change the color of a shirt in photoshop

Id: M28Iyph_hcw

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020