Recolor Objects without Making Selections in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Recolor Objects Without Making Selections in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Recolor Objects without Making Selections in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at recoloring objects in Photoshop, and we're going to start by recoloring a couple of cars using two very different recolor techniques. Then we're going to turn an image from autumn into spring, again using a more advanced technique. In every case, we're going to do it without making complex selections. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up, and if you'd like to leave a written review, please do so. These help other students find my classes and determine if they'll enjoy them too. Unfortunately, I'm not able to reply directly to these reviews, but be assured that I do read them all and I totally appreciate the time that you take to give feedback. If you'd like to leave a comment, however, please do so because not only can I read your comments, I can also reply to them. I will also look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready, now let's get started recoloring objects in Photoshop without making complex and tedious selections. 2. Recolor Objects - Part 1: I've downloaded this image from Morgue file for us to use, and I'm going to give you the download link so that you too and go and get it and practice on this image. What we're going to do is recolor this car and I've chosen this image because the color is very obvious and also because there's not a lot of this same green elsewhere in the image. It's easier to make color changes when the color that you're choosing to change is not elsewhere in the image and in particular, not really close to the area you want to recolor, and you can do this very easily without having to make complex selections. We're going to look at the hue saturation adjustments. I'll choose the layer, new adjustment layer, hue saturation. Now I'll always do this as an adjustment layer because I want to be able to alter this later on, so click "okay" and you can see that this is coming in as an adjustment layer and it has a mask, which means that if we mess up and change the color of other objects in the image, it's going to be very easy to mask that out and so we've got our hue saturation adjustment layer applied to our image. If we just drag on the hue slider, what happens is that we walk all the colors in the image around, which has the effect of re-coloring the car, but unfortunately, it also recovers everything else, so it's not ideal. I'm just going to double-click on the word hue to return that slider to its neutral position. We're working at the moment on the master channel, which is the red, green, and blue composite channel. If I dropped down this list here, you'll see that we could also work on individual colors and clearly this car is in the greens area. It's sort of green, yellow, but predominantly green. When I select green, you'll see that an additional set of controls appears down here and what Photoshop is doing is isolating this color in here as being the color that we're going to change. The hue slider this time is only going to affect greens in the image and not all the other colors. You can see that the McDonald's arches aren't changing color, and we can drag on the hue slider to apply a different color to our car. Now, there is some fracturing occurring towards the end of this slide and what we've got is we haven't gotten enough green selected so we're getting some sort of purply blue things happening here. But most of the other colors are pretty true. There's less fracturing in other colors here on the hue slider. For example, any orange and red area we're not getting quite so much fracturing. But if we want to get around the fracturing problem, what we're going to do is actually show it so we can see it. I'm going to start dragging on these sliders here to broaden the area that is being adjusted by this adjustment. I'm spreading out the colors that are being altered and that's reducing the fracturing. Now, it's also had an interesting effect on the McDonald arches which have gone green and also around here the trays have gone purple. So we've got some bleeding of this effect into other areas of the image which is undesirable. Our car looks pretty good, the rest of the image doesn't. I'm just going to close down that dialogue and we're going to turn our attention to the mask here. Because the mask will allow us to remove the effect from areas in the image that we don't want to be affected. But again, we don't want it to make complex selections either. I'm going to Lasso tool and I'm just going to drag the Lasso tool around relatively close to the car, paying particular attention to anything that really shouldn't have been recolored. For example, the leaf, I'm going to make sure that I don't bring the leaf in with me. But around here, I'm just going to drag in, being a little bit careful about what's happening here. Now, I missed a little bit of the car here, so I'm going to hold the Shift key as I just add that little bit of the car in, want to make sure that my selection is all the way around the car. Now I am going to invert this, so I'm going to choose, select and then inverse. Now instead of the car being selected, everything else is being selected. I'm going to click on the mask so that it has this little border around it and making sure that black is my foreground color and I'm just going to press Alt backspace, that would be option delete on the Mac and what happens the second that I do that is that we're removing this hue saturation color effect from the area that we had selected. In other words, everything except the car and so the leaf has gone back to its regular color so have the McDonald's arches and the tree over here. I'll press Control or Command D to Deselect the selection will just check around the edges of the car to make sure that we didn't miss anything. We can zoom in a little bit you can see that there is a little bit of discoloration here. Well, I'm going to re-select my mask. I'm going to click on my brush. I'm going to go and select a solid brush. I'm going to press the open square bracket K to reduce the size of the brush, I'm painting with black I have my mask selected, I'm just going to paint over that area where there's a little bit of color change that was unwanted. This is an area that I didn't select with the Lasso tool. I'll press Control or Command zero to zoom back out and that's pretty much all you need to do to change the color of the car is use the hue saturation adjustment layer, and then go and make a rough selection around the car, invert it and remove that from any areas in which the color might have bled. 3. Recolor Objects - Part 2: This next recoloring effect, we're going to recolor this orange car. Of course, there's some other orange in the image, so we are going to have to be careful about protecting that. The tool that we're going to use is one that actually affects the image so it's baked into the image if you like. We're going to start in the last palette, obviously window and then layers to open this up. I'm going to drag the background layer onto the new layer icon here to make a duplicate of it. This means that I can change the color of the car on this layer, but still have the original image detail accessible to me if I need to use it, and I will. I'm going to start here on this top-most layer and I'm going to choose Image, Adjustments, Replace Color. This is a tool that cannot be used as an adjustment layer and that's why we've made a duplicate of the image just in case. Now for this tool, what we need to do is to select the color in the image that we want to affect. I'm going to click here on the "Eyedropper tool" and I'm going to click on some "Orange" in the image. I'm going to click on the "Plus Eyedropper" and continue to add areas of orange into the image. Now I need to be careful or I'll see a real white in here. If I see a mottled color in this area of the image, I'm going to need to get rid of it because otherwise I'm not going to get a smooth color transition later on. If I make a mistake, I'm just going press "Control Z "to undo it. I'm going to work on getting a really good selection here. You'll probably find that the first time you do this, you don't make quite a good enough selection and that's fine, you just go back and try again. This image is also from morguefile and so I'm going to give give you the download link for it. You can select or deselect localized color clusters to work out whether either of those is better or worse for your image. I'm actually going to deselect it and also adjusting fuzziness will have an effect too. You might be able to adjust your final rendition a little bit using the Fuzziness slider. Whatever, we've got some areas in here that will be selected and recolored that we don't want to have recolored, but they're pretty well away from the car, so they're really not going to cause us too much trouble at all. Once I've made my selection, I'm going down here now to change the color of the car. I can do that in one of two ways, either I can just drag on the Hue slider to adjust it that way, or I can go and get a color of my choice. I'll click here and open up the color selector so I can go and get a color that I want to use and I want light turquoise. You can see now that the car has been beautifully recolored and we haven't had to make an in-depth selection; we haven't had to go round that with the Pen tool or the Magic Wand tool or anything, we've just used the eyedropper icon here, but we've also got some blending into these areas of the image. Well, the way to fix that is to click "Okay" to come out of here. Then we're going to add a mask to this layer, so with this layer selector, we're just going to click on the " Add Layer Mask" icon here. Now masks are advanced Photoshop, but they're pretty easy to understand and to use. First of all, you're going to click on this mask so that the little bars are around it, showing very clearly that you're working on the mask. You don't want to be working on the image, you want to be working on it's mask. Now you're going to go and get a paintbrush, so you going to click on the "Brush tool, " you're going to open up at the brushes palette and you're going to choose a hard, circular brush. It's hardness here is set to 100 percent, probably adjusting it down to about 80 to 85 is a good idea. We're just going click away from it. This is the brush size, if I want to increase it, I can use the Close square bracket key and I can use the Open square bracket key to just reduce it inside. I want it to be a good size for covering the areas that I need to remove because I don't want to be doing any fancy painting here. Now my mask is white, so that's giving me a hint that if I want to see through this image to the version below, I'm going to need to paint in black. You can only paint on masks in black or white or shades of gray. I'm going to pick up black, you can see already it's my foreground color; if It wasn't my foreground color, I would make it so by pressing the letter "D" to get the default colors and then just flipping them. Now with my mask selected, I'm going to paint over the areas that I want to bring back the original color in the image. I'm operating pretty much from my memory as to the areas that were selected that were white, in that replace color dialogue and I know that this area up here was white and I know that bar across there was. We can test it now by just clicking this layer on and off and checking to see if we see any difference when we do elsewhere in the image. I'm not seeing anything else and the image that is changing color, when I flip this layer on and off. I've masked out the area that was blue up here and we're seeing the red orange from the image layer below. That's another tool for replacing color in an image and doing it in a realistic way. 4. Recolor Objects - Part 3: For this color change, what we're going to do is, we're going to take this autumn or fall-looking leaves and make the image look a little bit more like it was shot in late spring, early summer. The lives need to be green. Now, this is a fairly typical situation where you have a color that is predominant in the image, these reddy yellow areas of the image, and the rest of the image is completely different in color, it's blue and white. Because of this contrast, the changing of color is going to be really, really easy, and we won't need to make a single selection, which is the really good news, because trying to make a selection here would be pretty horrible. Let's see how we're going to do it. Now, I've got my image open, I've got a locked background layer, that's fine. I'm going to choose Layer, and then New Adjustment Layer, and I'm going to use what's called Selective Color. I'll click "Okay". Now, Selective Color is a tool where you can select individual colors in the image from this drop-down list here. You can see you've got red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, and also quite neutrals and blacks. We can choose a color, and then we can change that color. We're actually going to start with reds because we don't have an orange selected. We've got to take the next best thing, which is going to identify and isolate and re-color the reds in this image. Now, we have sliders here for cyan, magenta and yellow, but we're used to working in RGB, which is red, green, and blue. There's a relationship between cyan, magenta and yellow that's really important to understand. That is that cyan, this bluey color in the background here, it's opposite is red. If we go in the direction of cyan, which is in a positive direction, we're going to add that bluey color to our leaves. Not very satisfactory. If we go in the opposite direction, we're going to add red because the opposite of cyan is red. Our layers are taking on a very orange look. Not what we want but interesting, just to understand the relationship between cyan and red. The relationship between magenta and one of the other colors in the RGB color space is that magenta, the pinky purple, that is in a positive direction, see these leaves are now turning a bit of pink. The opposite is green. If I go in the opposite direction to magenta, low and behold, I'm adding green to the leaves, so I've turned autumn into spring by simply dragging on the magenta slider. Taking it in a negative direction adds the opposite color to magenta, the opposite to magenta is green. There's a relationship too between yellow and one of the other colors in the RGB color space, it's blue. If we go in the yellow direction, we're going to add more yellow to the reds. If we go in the opposite direction well, we're going to start adding blue. Obviously, we don't want to do either of those. I don't even think we need any yellow in this. I think we're pretty good at this stage. Now, if you were trying to change colors in an image doing a similar process, you would just choose the nearest color to the color in the image that you want to alter. In some situations, you may need to choose two or three colors, and they'll generally be the colors either side of the main color. Now, we had a preponderance of red, but we could also test yellow. We could say if we could get any mileage by adding a little bit of green to the yellows. Well, there are some yellows. They're up here in the image. I can add a bit of green to them using the magenta slider, remove magenta, that's adding green. Now, I don't need very much, some I'm just going to add a little bit here. You could also test the color the other side of red, which is magenta. Let's go to magenta. Let's just see if adding some green to the magentas will help. Well, I'm not actually convinced about that. I'm just going to zero that off. If you're a little unsure about these sliders at anytime, just drag on them. Let's go back to red. If you want to see what happens, just drag all the way to one side, and then drag all the way to the other side. It'll be pretty clear very quickly as to whether or not that's an adjustment you want to make and exactly which direction the color is going. I'm going to close down the selected color dialogue and let's look at our leaves. Now, the sort yellow, I would like them to be a slightly richer green. For this, we're going to add another adjustment layer and we'll use a different tool. I'll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and this time, I'm going to choose Color Balance because this allows me to do something similar and adjust the colors in the image, but this time, I'm going to do it for shadows, mid tones or highlights, not for individual colors. I'm going to select mid tones because that's pretty much where these leaves are going to be. I'm going to pump up the green. I've got Preserved Luminosity selected here. I'm just going to increase the greens. I get a brighter green in my leaves. I might also try the yellows to see if there's any mileage in the yellows here, weather I want them to be a little bluer or I want them to be a little yellower. You can choose exactly what you want to happen with your leaves at this point. But using color balance with selective color, can be really handy. Let's just click to close this, but let's have a look and see what we've done. When I turn this layer off, the adjustment layer that we've just added, have a look and see what happens to the blues. You see that the blues become richer. They're almost a pupler color of blue, before we made that adjustment and now, they've gone green. If we want to kill the color that we just applied to this image in the blue area but leave it in the green area, we can do so using a tool called Blend If. I've got my top layer, the Color Balance layer selected here. I'm going to click on the "Fx" icon and I'm going to choose Blending Options. Down here is the Blend If dialogue. What we're going to do is we're going to say to Photoshop, we want the color balance adjustment to only apply to the areas which are not blue. We've got a selector here which allows us to select red, green, and blue, or just grayscale. Well, in this case, we want to protect the blue, so we're going to select blue. The process is to blend if either this layer is blue or the underlying layer is blue. Well, the blue color is coming from the underlying layer. We want to adjust it here. What I'm going to do is to start dragging on this little icon here. As I do, you can see the color creeping up the image. If I take it back down again, it gets removed. If I take it up, you can see the blue color starting to come through the image here. We're going to take it up until the blue color is all returned to the image. But I want this adjustment to be feathered a little bit. This little slider here splits in two. I'll hold the Alt or Option key and just drag it apart. That splits it in two so that the adjustment is fully applied at this point, and then, transitionally applied between these two sliders. Anytime you use Blend If, if you need to smooth out how it's being applied, just split those two sliders. I would suggest you do that anyway whenever you use it, just to make sure that you get a smooth transition. I'll click "Okay". In this way, we've been able to re-color our leaves. Let's have a look and see the effect. This was the original fall or autumn image. Then we used Selective Color to re-color the reds. Finally, we use Color Balance to add a little bit more green into the greens, but in doing so, we had to knock it out of the blues. We use this very special adjustment, this Blend If adjustment here to make sure that the color that we added to the green leaves was not also impacting the sky. Now, this little icon here is the only indicator that you've got that there is something special happening with this layer that the Blend If adjustment has been used. Just be aware that that's what that is going to be showing you. Your project for this class is going to be to find an object and recolor it using one or other of the techniques that I've shown in this class. You're perfectly free to download the images from Unsplash.com and from Morguefile and use those, or you can select an image of your choice. Post a copy of your before and after recoloring exercise in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about re-coloring objects in Photoshop without having to make complex selections. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.