Photoshop How To

A simple way to give photos more impact is to change the color of one or more objects in the scene. And you’ll be surprised how easy this task is to accomplish in Photoshop by watching the video below.

Sometimes you may to want to swap colors to create a special effect. Other times it’s simply a matter of making the tones of a key object more complimentary to the color of the background. Whatever your goal, this quick tutorial illustrates how to get the job done in barely four minutes.

This episode by instructor Colin Smith was actually created for Adobe, and it appears within Photoshop’s Discover Panel that includes a bunch of helpful hands-on tutorials. To save you a bit of time pulling it up, we’ve embedded the video below.

Smith’s goal with this demonstration is to change the color of the flower on a model’s face. He begins by choosing Photoshop’s Object Selection tool, and setting the mode to Rectangle. Then he makes a rectangular selection of the flower covering one of the model’s eyes.

Because Smith doesn’t want to change the yellow center of the flower, he quickly removes that from the selection. Now it’s time to change the color of the outer portion of the flower from orange to blue for better contrast with the background.

Smith demonstrates how to choose the specific replacement color you want, increase or decrease saturation, and brighten or darken the effect. All it takes to achieve these adjustments is moving the sliders side-to-side or up and down.

To retrieve details in what now appears as a solid blue flower, Smith simply changes the blending mode from Solid to Color. The beauty of this simple approach is that it’s non-destructive, and you can modify the effect whenever you want by simply double-clicking on the adjustment. Couldn’t be easier, right?

You can find more helpful editing tips on Smith’s YouTube channel and in another tutorial we posted recently, explaining how to give digital photos a film look in Lightroom.