Photoshop 101: How To Select and Change Object Color In Photoshop

When editing images, there will likely be a time that you’ll need to change the color of something in the image. Maybe the white balance is over, making red tones look a bit too pinky for your liking. Or maybe someone is wearing a blue shirt, but you’d really prefer it if they were wearing a black shirt. For whatever reason,you can change the object's in Photoshop easily with this three simple tricks!

The Tool is located on your toolbar, and it looks like this:

In order to find this tool, click and hold down on the Brush Tool.

I have chosen a simple photograph of red daisy for this tutorial. To start out, I’d recommend choosing a photograph without too many similar colors. The more complicated the photograph, the more complicated this process will be. Once you have mastered this tutorial, feel free to work on any photograph you’d like!

We are going to change the color of the red daisy. In order to use this tool, you’re going to need to set your foreground color to the color you want your daisy's petals to be. Take a look at the bottom of your toolbar, and you’ll see two overlapping squares – one black and one white. Click on the top square.

You’ll see a new window pop up, allowing you to choose any color you’d like. Once you have chosen it, and click ‘Ok’.

Take a look at the top of your screen. You’ll see options saying Mode, Limits and Tolerance. You’ll also see your brush options, such as size and hardness.

A useful tip: if you want to change the size of your brush easily, use the left and right bracket keys. The left bracket key ( [ ) will make your brush smaller, while the right bracket key ( ] ) will make your brush larger. Want to easily change the hardness? Simply press the same two brackets while holding down the shift key. The left bracket will make the edges softer while the right bracket will make them harder.

The Mode should be set to Color, since you’re only trying to change the color. Your Limits should be set to Contiguous, and your Tolerance you can play around with, but I have mine set at 40%. This allows me to paint over the yellow edges of the red daisy's petals, yet still remain within the red daisy and not bleed out onto the background.

Now begin to paint on the area of your photograph that you want to be changed

See how they’ve changed to a more mauve color? You can use this tool on anything in your photograph that you want to change, and by changing the Mode to Hue, Saturation or Luminosity, you can change all of those aspects of the photograph as well.

In order to use this tool, go to Image > Adjustments > Replace .

You will see a box pop up. You see how the Eyedropper Tool is selected? This tool is going to be used to tell Photoshop what color you want to replace in your image. I made sure this tool was selected, and then I clicked in the little icon of my image right on the the daisy's petals. Now, if you have a lot of similar colors in your image, you’ll notice that having the Fuzziness Level set to 200 is going to change a lot of those colors as well. By setting that to a lower number, it will only change the color you selected. Now, you just play around with the Hue, Saturation and Lightness Sliders until you reach your desired result.

The tools lets you adjust the colors in the image by selecting which colors to adjust and then adding more or less of another color to them.
To use it, select Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color . Using it as an adjustment layer fix lets you later remove the recoloring from any part of the image by painting on the adjustment layer mask.

In the dialog, you can select the color to alter from the Colors drop-down list. In this image I wanted to change the Reds color of the daisy's petals, so they are selected. If your color is closer to something else, use that drop down tool to select Greens, Yellows, etc.

The color sliders below this show Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. It helps to understand these colors and their opposites; Cyan is opposite Red, Magenta is opposite Green and Yellow is opposite Blue.

So, for example, if you drag the magenta slider to the right, you will add magenta to the image but if you drag it to the left, you will add green – its opposite. The other sliders work in the same way.

Now you can use the sliders below to change the Reds in your photograph. When you change the sliders, you can see the changes affecting your final photograph. I set my sliders to this:

And my daisy now look like this:

This tool works well when you have an image such as this one where most of the color that you want to change (the reds) only appear in the area that you want to change and not elsewhere in the image. If you have too many colors that are too similar in your photograph, you’ll find that this tool begins to replace parts of your photograph that you don’t want changed. If this is the case, use one of your selection tools before selecting the Selective Color Tool.

Voila! Three easy ways to replace color in Photoshop. If you’re having difficulty with any of these three ways, remember: use one of your selection tools first!! Selecting the exact part of the image that you want to replace the color of will make the process much easier.

Once you have mastered changing something simple such as these daisy, you can move on to more complicated parts of an image such as hair and skin tone. Keep practicing, and you’ll be a pro in no time!