“Replacing Color in PSE” Tutorial by Andrea

I was going to start delving into the world of editing RAW photos this week.

Unfortunately, I’m getting very behind in grading papers, writing IEPs and cleaning my house. (Ha! Who am I kidding? I don’t clean.)

After cheating on the green theme this week by changing the color of my daughter, Jordyn’s, shirt…a quicker tutorial idea evolved.

When I write these tutorials, I’m definitely not writing them as an expert. I’m merely sharing something I’ve discovered with the hopes that other people will contribute tips and tricks in the comments section.

Let’s get started.

Here’s my little princess in a navy blue patterned shirt:

Aw! She matches her stroller.

(Thus the reason she is mistaken as a boy all the time!)

Green theme + laziness = switch color of shirt

In my typical fashion, I will make this appear much harder than it is. Believe me, this fix only took 2 minutes or less. My explanations, on the other hand, take much longer.

There is a handy function under Enhance – Adjust Color – Replace Color. First, I’m actually going to show you the wrong way (in my opinion) to do this. I want to show you the messy results you get by jumping into replacing the color right away.

A menu comes up with little droppers at the top. Take the left dropper, click it on the color in the picture you want to change, then adjust the hue slider at the bottom. You’ll notice the color in the shirt changes, but so does the blue in the stroller.

That’s because all the similar dark blues are being replaced with the new color. There is a fuzziness (mask) slider that can tone down how much blue is affected, but I wasn’t able to control enough to change only the colors in the shirt.

That’s okay. The fix is simple. Cancel the color change and start over. Take the magnetic lasso tool and select all the way around the shirt. Then choose Control-C….Control-V.

This copies just the shirt into a new layer. Make sure you have only the top (shirt) layer selected. (It isn’t absolutely necessary that you paste the shirt into a new layer. I like to do this so that I can delete the layer if I change my mind later.)

Go through the same steps again. (Enhance – Adjust color – Replace Color)

Click the left dropper tool on the color in the picture you want to change. Now you can adjust the hue, saturation and lightness on the bottom.

Also, adjusting the fuzziness at the top will show you what part of the picture is being masked.

You can also click on the color box at the bottom to bring up a colors’ palette.

I have found that you want to keep dark colors dark and light colors light. Otherwise, it looks very fake. (See below.)

I chose a dark green to fit the theme this week.

I also adjusted the saturation.

Voila!

Jordyn’s shirt was pretty easy to change with the stark contrasts between navy and white. Nathan’s shirt in the next photo was a bit more challenging.

I again selected all the yellow parts of the shirt, copied and pasted them into a new layer.

I clicked on the yellow. Notice how the folds in the shirt are still showing as yellow? There are two easy adjustments to do.

First, slide the fuzziness adjustment over so that more of the folds are in periwinkle.

Then take the middle dropper and click it into the yellow in the folds. This fills in the darker yellow with a darker periwinkle.

I also missed a bit of yellow on the bottom with my selection layer. I matched the color of the shirt in my paint palette and used the brush to fill in that small section.

That’s all there is to it.

Watch out! This becomes very addictive.

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Andrea is a mom to three beautiful kiddos, a full-time special education teacher to her lucky students, an incredible amateur photographer and the amazingly creative sister of I ♥ Faces co-founder, Angie. We all know that there is a huge lack of Photoshop Elements tutorials in the online world, so we are thrilled that she is willing to share the things she learns about this user-friendly program with all of us!

Tagged as: adobe, Andrea Riley, challenge, color, editing, elements, gradient map, help, how to, I heart faces, instructions, layer, photo, photo editing, photography, photoshop, pop, replacing color, step-by-step, tutorial