How to change a specific color in Photoshop. Replace color in Photoshop

In this lesson you will learn in detail about ways to change colors in Photoshop. All steps are described in detail, accompanied by pictures, so that it is clear and intelligibly explained where and what function can be used. So, let's begin!

The first way to replace a color is to use the ready-made function in Photoshop “Replace Color” or Replace Color in English.

I will show you with a simple example, a simple picture. First you need to download photoshop cc. Let's take the icon and open it in Photoshop.

Trowel on a yellow icon. We will replace yellow with any other color that interests us. To do this, go to the menu Image - Correction - Replace Color (Image - Adjustments - Replace Color)

The Color Replacement Function dialog box appears. Now we must indicate what color we will change; to do this, activate the Eyedropper tool (see arrow) and click on the trowel with it. You'll see this color appear in the dialog box at the top, which is labeled Highlight.

At the bottom is the Replacement heading - there you can change the selected color. But first, you can set the Scatter in the selection parameter. The larger the parameter, the more colors it will capture. In this case, you can set it to maximum. It will capture all the yellow in the image.

Configure the Color Replacement settings - with the color you want to see instead of the one being replaced. I made it green by setting the Hue, Saturation and Brightness parameters.

When you're ready to change the color, click OK.

So we changed one color to another.

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Hello, dear readers. Replacing colors in a picture is quite an interesting and addictive activity. Personally, I can spend quite a lot of time doing this entertainment. There are several tools that will help with this work and each of them is suitable for its own case.

Today I will tell you how to change the color of a picture in Photoshop and which method to use in each specific case. You will like it, I assure you.

It should be noted that I use Photoshop CC, but we won’t do anything specific, so you can safely start reading even if you have a simpler version of this program. Not an online service, of course, it is weak and non-functional, but in cases with CS3, 5 or 6 you will not notice any discrepancies.

Let's get started?

Simple color correction

Equipment for high-quality photography is quite expensive, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t have it. You can get good pictures using editing programs such as Photoshop. To be honest, I use this opportunity for almost every photo I post on my blog. I like the colors brighter than what is usually posted on the Internet.

By the way, if you are interested, read the article already published in Start-Luck. I’ll take a pre-prepared picture to start talking about simple color correction and get to work.

I open the “Image” tab in the top menu, and then the “Correction” category. Take the time to understand from your own experience what “Brightness/Contrast”, “Richness”, “Hue/Saturation” and other options that you will find in this tab are.

You won’t spoil or break anything, and you can always return to the original version by simply refusing to save changes when closing the picture. Just look at how certain tools behave. As they say, what you come to on your own is always remembered better than when everything is explained to you on your fingers.

For example, open “Color Tone” and pull the various sliders, you will immediately see how the picture changes colors and will be able to build a logical chain between your actions and the result. Don't forget to check the "View" box.

Color balance changes colors more strongly, the settings are more subtle and interesting.

If you want to work with a certain element, it’s enough; I’ve already talked more than once in simple and understandable language about how to do this with more than 8 tools and methods. I won’t repeat myself, it’s not difficult to find the publication, just follow the link just above.

Now I will use the simplest method - the “Magic Wand”. I just click on the object and the desired fragment is highlighted. Using the tolerance setting, I set the variation in color.

As you know, there are many shades of white, blue and any other color. The higher the tolerance number, the more shades from the spectrum the program will determine and highlight using a wand.

Change the direction of the curve and the color becomes different.

By the way, if you want to work with the background in this way, that is, the area that is outside the selection, then you need to first select it, and then in the “Selection” tab of the top menu, select the “Inversion” option.

You can remove running ants using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+D.

Replacement by contrast

I talked about this method in great detail in the article. « » . Now we will quickly run through the main functions. I'll give you a little instructions, which will be enough.

This tool is ideal for replacing a bright, stand-out color in a picture. For example, a yellow apple on a white background, a red car in a green forest, or, as now, a bright girl in a dark room.

I return to the “Adjustments” section and select the “Color Replacement” tool here. Using the Eyedropper tool, which appears automatically, I select the shade that will change. In this case, I click on the curtain. Then I move the Scatter slider so that the girl becomes almost black, and all other objects have outlines ( I wrote a whole article about how to draw a black background).

Please note that the curtain and the wall still need to have outlines; simply setting the spread to 200 will not work. Otherwise, the program will not take into account shades and will paint everything unattractively with a single color. Now I click on the color plate at the very bottom of the window, under it it says “Result”.

I click through the spectrum and different shades until I achieve the perfect result.

Ready. Without repainting the photo, we got an excellent result. In just a few seconds. Now let's talk a little about the disadvantages. As I said above, it is convenient to use this method if the image has contrast. To repaint a particular girl's dress in a different shade, you will have to highlight it. I can offer another interesting one, in which much attention is paid to complex objects, for example, hair.

I’ll use the Magnetic Lasso tool myself.

Now I transfer the dress to a new layer by pressing Ctrl+J at the same time. ? Read the post that I recently prepared for beginners about them in detail.

We return to “Color Replacement” in the “Correction” section. In this case, you will have to change the hue using the “Hue”, “Saturation”, “Brightness” sliders. If I click on the “Result” box, it turns out extremely disgusting and implausible.

In my opinion, the shade of the young lady’s dress is still far from ideal, and therefore I want to blur it a little. I open the “Filter” tab and select everyone’s favorite “Gaussian Blur”.

The robe became less clear, but the shade evened out somewhat.

As I already said, this method works best if there are contrasts, so I’ll be satisfied with this, and I’ll tell you about the last tool for today.

A quick tool for complex cases and dramatic changes

I like the Color Replacement brush better than other tools for a similar task. You can find out about it in the article « » , in which I turn the most ordinary girl into a red-haired Smurf woman with blue skin.

Finding a brush is not difficult; to do this, you need to right-click on a regular brush. An additional menu will open in which you can select the desired tool.

I choose a color. Everything is as usual. Window on the right. In this case, black, and then I paint over part of the girl’s hair. Please note that all shades are preserved.

You can put green.

To change the brush size, use the keys.

I can also offer a training video on this topic.

Well, if you want to understand the program more professionally and understand exactly how this or that function works in the Photoshop program, then I offer a very useful course “ Photoshop for beginners in video format ».

Maximum useful information about tools. That's basically it. Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter to stay up to date with the latest, useful and simple information.

See you again and good luck.

11.02.2015 27.01.2018

In this lesson I will tell you in detail about ways to change colors in Photoshop. I will describe all the steps in detail, accompany them with pictures to make it clear and clearly explain where and what function can be used.

1 way

The first way to replace a color is to use the ready-made function in Photoshop “Replace Color” or Replace Color in English.

I will show you with a simple example, a simple picture. Let's take the icon and open it in Photoshop.

Trowel on a yellow icon. We will replace yellow with any other color that interests us. To do this, go to the menu Image – Correction – Replace Color (Image – Adjustments – Replace Color)

Configure the Color Replacement settings - with the color you want to see instead of the one being replaced. I made it green by setting the Hue, Saturation and Brightness parameters.

When you're ready to change the color, click OK.

So we changed one color to another.

Method 2

The second method in terms of operation can be said to be identical to the first. But we will look at it in a more difficult image.

For example, I chose a photo with a car. Now I will show you how to replace the color of a car in Photoshop.

As always, we need to indicate what color we will replace. To do this, you can create a selection using the color range function. In other words, select an image by color.

To do this, go to the menu Selection – Color Range (Select – Color Range)

Next, all you have to do is click on the red color of the car and we will see the function that defined it - coloring it white in the preview window. The white color shows which part of the image is highlighted. The spread in this case can be adjusted to the maximum value. Click OK.

After you click OK, you will see how the selection has been created:

Now you can change the color of the selected image. To do this, use the function – Image – Correction – Hue/Saturation (Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation)

A dialog box will appear.

Immediately check the Toning option (bottom right). Now using the Hue, Saturation and Brightness parameters you can adjust the color. I adjusted the color blue.

All. The color has changed.

It was - it became:

There are dozens of ways to change colors in Adobe Photoshop. The easiest and fastest is to use the special command Replace color or “Replace color”. This function is convenient to use when working with any object in a photograph. This command is also useful when replacing the color of several small details scattered chaotically throughout the image. This article describes detailed step-by-step instructions for performing this simple task.

Open the image in Photoshop. Create a duplicate of the main layer. To do this, go to the “Layer” tab in the top menu and select “Duplicate Layer” or press Ctrl+J. Go to the “Image” tab. Select “Adjustments” – “Replace Color”. . A dialog box will appear. At the top of it, check the box next to Localized Color Clusters

Below there are 3 pipettes. With the first one selected, click on the area of the object where you want to change the color. It will appear in the top square of the dialog box.

An eyedropper with a plus sign adds an area. Use it when there are unselected areas on the object. Minus eyedropper – decreases the part of the image that cannot be changed.

Click “OK”. A good effect is obtained in contrasting photographs, especially in the absence of similar shades of changing color. If there are many tones of the selected paint, but you only need to change one area, first select it using the appropriate tool on the taskbar. Thus, changing the color of any object in Photoshop is simple and quick.

First, let's get acquainted with the tools. Click and hold the mouse button over the brush icon in the toolbar until a menu appears and select the Color Replacement brush (hovering and holding the cursor over each brush will bring up a tooltip with the name of the brush).

By clicking on the various tools, you can see changes at the bottom of the main menu bar. This place is called the tool properties panel. Depending on the selected tool, there will be different settings here. With their help, you can choose how this or that instrument will behave.
Pay attention to the properties of the Color Replacement tool. By clicking on the first button, you can select color options (hue, saturation, color or brightness) in the selected area.
Next, you can choose one of three “droppers”. Unlike the eyedropper, which is among the main tools, these three are just elements of the Color Replacement tool. The first of the three will allow you to select the donor color and the color you want to replace. The second eyedropper remembers the color you clicked on and replaces only that color. The third uses the background color as the replacement color.
The penultimate option will allow you to select the edge detection mode. In this article, the "edge selection" mode was used. Certain tasks may require the use of different settings or combinations of eyedroppers. The last option is “smoothing”, which is activated to obtain the best result for a given task.
In the Brush Options panel, you can also increase or decrease the Tolerance value (affects the range of variation in the hue of the color you are about to replace). The larger the range, the wider the range of shade will be taken into account when replacing color.

Changing colors. Double-click on the primary color in the toolbar. A window will open allowing you to manually select a replacement color. You can also select one of the already created colors by clicking on the “Color Library” button.

Click on the letter "i" to activate the eyedropper tool. In the settings panel you can see the number of selected pixels. Because Photoshop uses an average of the selected pixels, make sure you don't select too many: if you select an area close to the edge of the area you want, you risk getting a less accurate replacement area. For the example, a limit of 1 pixel was used, but a value of 3 pixels also shows good results. Click with the eyedropper (still selected) on the area whose color you would like to change (this will clear the palette of the default color).
The color of the selected area should appear below in the toolbar.
Click on the Color Replacement brush in the Tools panel.
Select the second eyedropper in the brush properties panel. Before using the brush, you can change its size and replacement color.
Now try to paint (press and hold the mouse button) the desired area. Don't worry about going beyond it—Photoshop only sees the selected area.
Because the image used in this article was created as a vector image in Adobe Illustrator CS4, it has quite sharp edges. This made it possible to find the required tolerance level quite easily. The following settings for the Color Replacement brush were used: size 77, hardness 100%, spacing 25%, angle=0, roundness=100. Additional eyedropper settings: edge selection, medium (with target icon in the lower left corner), tolerance=21%, anti-aliasing on.
After completing all the settings, you can proceed to painting.