How to Use the Color Sampler Tool in Photoshop – Easily Exact-Match Colors

How to Use the Color Sampler Tool in Photoshop

Learn to use the color sampler tool in Photoshop. This is a very powerful tool to help you exact match the colors of one object to another. Easily change the colors of another object.

Today we’re looking at the color sampler tool in Photoshop. First, we’ll go over the basics of the color sampler tool, and then we’ll give an example of how you can use a color sampler tool. To exactly match the color of one object to another. The color sampler tool is up here in the menu bar, and it is in the same area as the eyedropper tool.

But you may see the Eyedropper tool first. So what you want to do, you can hit ALT or Option and click on the Eyedropper tool, and your tool changes to the color sampler tool. I want to make sure I have the info panel displaying. I’m going to click on that. So with our color sampler tool, we just click and notice in the info tab there is a one with a hashtag.

So this is the information about that particular point that we clicked on with the color sample tool. And I can keep on clicking and it makes points. And every time I do, you see it in the info panel, Another numbered point with the hashtag displays and the color sampler will sample up to ten points. So each of these points represents a pixel or an average of pixels depending on what you choose in the sample size up here.

If I choose point sample, then that point represents pixels at that one point. If I change it to three by three or five by five, that point is actually sampling. In this case, a five by five area of pixels and they’re all averaged together to give me the values that you see over here. So these points in this case will give you the RGB values right there at that location.

So hash tag one is an RGB of 254 211 and 208 with our color sampler tool. If I am moving over the image, you can see up here at the top. These values are changing. These are the real-time values. As I’m moving through the image. So in real-time up here, showing the RGB values and the CMYK values, and that’s what you’re seeing as I’m moving across the image, I can move any of these points by clicking in the middle of the point and just dragging it.

I can move it anywhere I want. I can delete any of my points if I am on point one, for instance, I hold down the option key and I am on my point. My cursor turns to a scissors, so if I click, I will delete it come over to my info tab. If I click, I can choose my color modes.

I can change whatever color mode I want this to display in. If want to choose CMYK all of these now on display CMYK values. We’ll work in actual color, which is RGB. If you come up here to where it says x and y, you can change the units that you are tracking in.

We’ll leave this pixels. If I want to clear all of my color sample points at once, I come up here to the top and where says clear all, I just click that and all of these points will be gone and these points are going to stay here with the image. If you save it, if you don’t clear it, it’s going to stay with the image the next time you come in.

Setup Target Image

So that is how the color sampler works. We saw how you can create a point and you saw how each of these points tracks the values in this case for tracking RGB. And we’re tracking a five-by-five average of the pixels. So each point, along with the input tab is going to be key to how we’re going to use it in the next example.

Now we’re going to use our color sampler tool in an example and we’re going to match the colors exactly. What we’re going to do is we’re going to use the image on the left as a reference image. So we are changing clothing colors. The image on the right is our target, and we’re going to get the exact match of the colors in the highlights, the mid-tones in the shadows all from the color sampler tool.

First, what we need to do is create two blank layers. We’ll call the layer on the top reference and the layer below we’re going to call the target. First, we’re going to select our target layer and we’re going to use our brush tool B for the brush tool, and we’re going to use a brush with a hardness of 100%.

You can select a hard round brush and you can set your opacity and your flow to 100. And when the brush tool is selected I’ll hit alt or option and sample right here, this is probably a good area for a highlight to select. And If you’re not certain what areas are highlights shadows and mid-tones, you can use the curves adjustment layer as a helper for right now just bring up the curves adjustment layer, click on this hand tool up here, and as I move the eyedropper across the image you can see on the curves point is moving up and down depending by select.

Over here it’s in the shadow area right here. It’s showing somewhere in the mid-tones and over here it’s up near the highlight area. So that could help you determine where to take your samples for your highlights shadows and mid-tones. So my target layer selected and hold alt or option and select right here for my highlight area and I’m just going to paint some more over here, my highlight and click alt or option and click over here for my mid-tone and I’m painting my target mid-tone and I’m going to zoom in a little bit hold Alt Option and click over here in the shadow area and paint my shadow color.

Setup Color from Reference Image

So now let’s get our colors for our highlights mid-tones and shadows from our reference image. I’m going to select my reference layer up here, and with my brush tool still selected, I am going to hit the alt or option turns into an eyedropper, and now I’m going to hold my mouse down. And if you look over here at the color swatch on the left-hand side, it has changed into the foreground color.

But if I keep on holding my mouse down and this is a tip, I can sample a color outside of Photoshop. So again, it looks like I’m sampling inside of Photoshop right now, but if I keep my mouse down, watch what happens to the color swatch as they move out of Photoshop onto the reference image on my desktop.

It just change color so now I’m going to select up here, which looks like a highlight, and I’m come back in to my photo and right here I’m going to paint my highlight for my reference image. I do the same thing. Hold down my mouse right over outside of Photoshop. Choose something like this as a mid-tone, come back into Photoshop and I’m going to paint my mid-tone color from my reference image.

I hold ALT or Option of my mouse down come out of Photoshop, come over here and select somewhere over here as my shadow color come back in Photoshop and paint my reference shadow color right there. Any area that you’re going to change a color of, say in this example here, the color top, we’re going to need to make a selection of that area.

Exact-Match Colors with the Color Sampler Tool

So we need to make a selection of a green top. I’ve already done that. I’ve saved the selection and loaded that selection back in, you can use something like the quick selection tool. Now I want to add a curves adjustment and notice with this curves adjustment right here, the mask right here shows where a green top is selected. I’m going to make a copy of the reference layer.

I’m going to duplicate here. You can call this reference copy and I’m going to move it down below the curves adjustment layer and I’m going to grab my color sampler right here where the eyedropper is. I’m going to hold ALT OR Option and I selected it and then click on each of the reference colors. There’s the highlight, there’s the mid-tone and there’s a shadow.

So on my info panel, you see that I have three samples, all three showing RGB is what we’re sampling, and we use the five by five average up here is our sample size. Now I’m going to click on the layer thumbnail here. And so now we’re going to do we are going to select the hand tool and according to the RGB values of the target colors, we’re going to create anchor points for the different color channels.

So with RGB selected on our curves adjustment layer, select the hand tool come over here to our target colors. If I hold the shift + command key and click on each of the colors of our target colors and what it did become to the red channel here at the three points that it created for each color, there is a highlight, a mid-tone, and a shadow.

Same for the green as three points. Same for the blue and all these points. We’re all created at once with RGB selected in coming over here and holding down shift and command and clicking on each one of these target colors. So this is where we’re going to come into each of the channels. We’re going to use the information in the info tab.

And those came from the points on our color sampler right here on our reference colors. So we’re going to go to each point. We’re going to start off with red and you see red for point 1 is 239. We’re going to highlight or select this point right here. You saw where the cursor changed. So that means I’m right on that point and that is a highlight, and I’m going to change that to the value of 239.

Then I can either hover over the point or I can hit minus and that selected that point #2 on red, it’s 180, then change my output here to one 180 and I’ll go down to the third point. Red is 90, I changed my output to 90 and then I’ll go to the green channel and I’ll do the same point #1 for green is 183.

I change the output to 183, go to my next point and for green, it’s 117 and green. My last point is 48 change my output to 48 and I’ll speed this up a little bit. I’ll do the same thing or blue and if at any point when I was changing those and I wanted to see the values compared to could whole shift and click on the Curves mask and you could see that the target values and reference values are matching up, I hold shift and, I will turn on my layer mask and my colors are changed.

So our color sampler values in the info tab helped us to match by changing the points on the curves adjustment layer. There is my reference photo on the left outside of Photoshop and we changed the color. There’s the before and there’s the after.

See the previous blog article here ➡️ How to Color Grade in Photoshop Using Curves

Check out my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com