3 Easy Ways To Select And Change Colors In Photoshop

In this video I’m gonna show you three easy ways to select and change colors in Photoshop. Let’s get started. In this example, we’re going to select this background layer here, and we’re gonna change the color. So, first, what we’re gonna do is create a new layer, then I’m gonna come up here to select color range. Now with the color range tool, I do have a video that I’m gonna put up in the card all about using the color range tool and making selections with it. But we’ll go over it briefly here. So we have all these options here. We can sample colors, which is what we’re gonna use now and then you can use all these other selections by color or even by skin tone. The fuzziness is going to allow you to select more or less, and we can either select by gray scale, black matte, white matte or quick mask.

Using the Color Range Tool – Select And Change Colors In Photoshop

With an eyedropper tool I’m going to click on the blue background and you can see it selected a little bit. I’m going to change this to grayscale now and I’m going to use the plus eyedropper and just click around in the image and the areas that are white are selected. And there are a few areas here with the texture where you see the dark spots in the background and that’s okay, I’m just clicking around. And if it hadn’t selected enough by now, you can raise the fuzziness a little bit, but it did a pretty good job just like that. And when I click okay you can see that I do have the selected area here. You can see what they call the marching ants around the selection here. And there’s a couple of areas, dots that you can see because of the texture in the background we’ll take care of that in a minute but now, I want to use the hue and saturation adjustment layer.

And as soon as I selected that you can see that it created a mask with my selection in it. There’s my selection right there. And hold Alt or Option and click on the layer mask and with the brush, B for the brush tool, I’m going to make sure my color is white that I am painting with and I’m going to turn up my flow to 100%. I just want to get of all these little specks here. And so I can get closer. A little tip here, you can use the overlay blend mode and get closer to it and not go over onto your selection. Hold down Alt or Option and click on the layer mask, click on the properties of the hue and saturation and we can adjust that. So we can play with hue any way we want. Get all kinds of colors. And we could refine the selection but we’re focused more on changing the color.

Okay. Let’s change the color of her pants now. Let’s create a new layer and come up here to select, color range, and use the eye-dropper tool and I’m going to click on her pants here. Just click once there. I’m going to change the selection preview to grayscale. And I’m going to click on the plus eye-dropper tool, and I’m going to click around some more on her pants, trying to get all these dark areas. And I can turn up the fuzziness and that will help a lot. It will select a lot more. And I’m going to say okay. And now that we have her pants selected, I’m going to create a new hue and saturation adjustment layer. And I can adjust the hue. All these different colors. And I can take down the saturation a little bit. And use the lightness, bring back some of that detail. And we’ve changed the color of her pants.

Using The Gradient Map – Select And Change Colors In Photoshop

Okay, let’s select and change colors another way. This time I’m going to use the object selection tool. And I’m going to select her pants and it did a pretty good job there. I can hold Alt or Option and drag over this area right here on her ankle. And now, I want to make sure that my default colors over here are black and white and create a gradient map. And double click.

And now I’m in the gradient editor. So these points here are shadow area and this way it’s going towards highlight and this is the highlight area. And as you go over this way, it is going towards the shadows. I click and make a point right in the middle, I can click on the color, I’m going to click on blue, and I can change this any way I want. Say okay, and then I can move this point here, make it darker if I like. Something like that. And say okay.

Now I want to change the color of the other model’s pants. And I am going to use the object selection tool again. See how this does. Pretty good. There’s a couple of spots here that can highlight. And let’s see if we can get that over her thumb. Okay. We got that around her thumb. Now let’s create another gradient map and double click. We’re in a gradient map editor, I’m going to click say right there in the middle, and I’m going to choose red. And I can use this point, I can move it, make it darker, lighter. There are all kinds of options. And then I can say okay. And so I’ve changed both the color of their pants with the gradient map.

Using Hue/Saturation Adjustment – Select And Change Colors In Photoshop

So now I’m going to use the quick selection tool and I’m just going to select her top here. Get as many of these areas as I can. And now that we’ve got everything selected, let’s create a hue saturation adjustment layer. Now that we’ve made our selection and created our hue saturation layer, you can double click on the properties and make our adjustments to hue any way we like and there’s our adjustments to our hue saturation and lightness and that is using the quick selection tool and hue and saturation layer.

Another way that we could change the color of her top, is we can create a solid color adjustment layer. Say okay to that. I’m going to change the blend mode of this to color and I’m going to copy the same mask to the color fill layer. I’m going to press down Alt and drag it up to the color fill layer. And there you can see that that’s another way to change the color. Also, we can make it another color, a green and we have control over the color picker. We can make it lighter or any other color. So that’s another way, using the solid color adjustment layer.

Change Colors The Easy Way – Select And Change Colors In Photoshop

And now for a really simple way to change color, is just create a hue and saturation layer and use a color, like for instance, you could say this might be red. Red’s close enough. Use the eye-dropper tool and click, and it kind of refines. And my guess was right, it was red. And now you can change the color. Change your hue, make it a bluer Volkswagen. And you have control of course over your saturation and your lightness. Can change that any way you like. And if you see that you have a lot of colors that are outside areas, in this case the Volkswagen, you can use your layer mask here, and B for the brush tool, and you can paint black on your layer mask to alter areas that you want to remove the excess color. In this case, it was blue and purple all over the place. And you can remove it wherever you want, can mask it out. But that’s probably the simplest way to select and change color.

So now the question of the day. Which of these techniques did you find useful? Let me know in the comments below. If this video was helpful, give it a like and don’t forget to subscribe. If you want more short Photoshop tutorials, see the ones above and remember it’s never too late to learn Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

See my portfolio website here –> https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

See my tutorial on using the color range tool to make selections here —> https://charlescabrera.com/how-to-make-color-range-selection-in-photoshop/