Good day everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School on another video tutorial in Photoshop CS3.
Today we’re going to be looking at changing an object color. I’m going to show you three different ways of doing this, because there’s always many ways of doing things in Photoshop, so I want to show you three. There are probably even more, I know there are some ways by using masks and what not, but I’m going to show you really, really quick and basic ways of doing it so that you don’t have to fiddle around too long. Now, the first one that I’ll show you is the hue/saturation slider. What you need to do now is to go into image, adjustments, hue/saturation. You can always use control U as a shortcut to get there. And your dialogue box appears.
Now let’s go through this dialogue box if you’ve never used the hue/saturation or you’re not sure exactly how it works. The first box that we see here is the drop down menu. When master is selected which is default, it will affect all the colors on the whole image. What we need to do to change a specific color is to select a channel, a color channel from the bar here. And we’ll get into that in a minute. Now the three sliders that we see here we’ll actually be using mostly the top two. And especially in this tutorial the first one which is to change the hue or the color of an object. So I’ll be using that, we might saturate or desaturate after we’ve done the first hue change. And we won’t be really touching that lightness and brightness here, on that slider.
What I want to bring your attention to right now is the rainbow bars here. This is basically all your color ranges for this image, actually for all images. So this is the whole gamut of colors. When the master is selected, as you can see, there’s nothing that indicates specific color ranges. Now pay attention here just a second, I’m going into the red channel, oops! Look what happens in that color bar. A dark gray bar right in the middle here appears and it tells you this is the range that will be affected by the changes that you’ll be making. And this is the feathering out so that it has a smooth transition into the colors. So it’s feathering out into the oranges on one side and into the magenta on the other. Now what’s great about this is that you can manually adjust that. First of all, by clicking on the dart bar, you can slide the whole thing one way or another. Or if you click on the edges of the bar, you can increase your range, our color range. And also by clicking on the cobster you can increase your feathering to give you even more detail.
Now I‘ve done this for this object, what we’ll be doing is changing the heart color. And let’s just see how it does. Let’s pretend its St. Patrick’s Day and we want a green heart here. So which way are we going to go? That’s the magenta way so we want to go to the other way. Getting into oranges, yellows, oh! We’re getting some greens here. And that’s a nice shade of green that I like. Now you want to make sure that’s almost all the reds here are affected, I can see that some of the shadowing here isn’t affected. I can click on my shift key and you’ll see a plus sign up here beside the eyedropper, and I’m going to go click into that shadow, to get all the red out. And there you go. Now, I have a nice green heart for St. Patrick’s Day. And that’s Number 1.
Now I’ll cancel this, and I’ll show you the second way of doing this. Again into adjustment, we’ll go down to selective color. This dialogue box appears and you have all your colors here. Now, I’m showing you this technique this way, selective color. I don’t use it often unless it’s a really, really specific color without too much gradient in it. As you’ll see here, when I play with my reds, and I go to one way or another, when it comes into the shadows or the reflective area here, it doesn’t do the hue justice. It doesn’t give it nice feel to it; it’s not as precise as we would want it to be so this example isn’t great for this object. So you really need an object with a very specific or very short range of colors, so really, really red image or without any gradients in it. So that’s Number 2.
One of my favorite ones that I like to use, again in adjustments, it’s called replace color. It’s very similar to the hue/saturation but what it gives you; it actually gives you an image, a visual image of what you’ll be changing. Now again, with my eyedropper, I’m going to click on my heart, and as you can see something appears here, and the white indicates what will be changed. Now if I want to add to that, I can just use my shift key again and the plus sign appears on my eyedropper, and I can just select in my heart or you can select right on the images here, exactly which colors you want affected by the replaced color. So, I’m going red into the images, I’m going right into the shadow here onto the reflection, and as you can see the reflection here and everything. Now fuzziness is again a bit like the feathering in the hue/saturation slider so it gives you some range.
You can see by increasing or decreasing and how the whites and the grays are there, so I just want the heart and some of the shadows to be there, so fuzziness are around 40 for this image, for now is good. Now let’s use the sliders here which are the exact same ones as in the hue/saturation dialogue box. So I want the green heart, so I’m going to move it this way and there’s our shade of green. Now looking at this image, all the reds seem to be out, except for part of the reflection here, so by clicking on my shift key, I’m going to click on it and wala, that simple. All of our reds are now greens. And that’s basically how you replace a color, or change an objects color in Photoshop. Three different ways of doing it, there are a lot more, if you know of some more, feel free to post them in the comments, it’s good for everyone.
Again, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School. Signing off and see you next time. Bye-bye.
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