Recoloring in Photoshop
Written May 2009
As is the case for most of my tutorials, this one is graphics intense!
If you are on a slow connection or running a slower computer you may want to give it a bit to load.
This tutorial was created from a request by a member of Hearts Enchanted =o) It is designed in Photoshop CS 3 and to my knowledge it works this way in versions 7 through CS 3 of Photoshop.
From warm colors to cools.
For this tutorial I've pulled a dress from the Kali Mother Nature tube set available in the members area. You can use this dress for the purpose of this tutorial but that's it unless you are a member of Hearts Enchanted.
So save that dress to your hard drive somewhere and open it in Photoshop which I will be referring to as PS from here on.
At the top of your PS you should see a list with IMAGE in it. Click on that and go to MODE then set the Mode to RGB. Now you should be able to edit the dress =o)
Ok. First things first. Use your eyedropper tool (looks something like this: 
) Pick the color of the outline of the dress. The color of the outline of the dress should now be your FOREGROUND color.
Time to go into IMAGE again, then ADJUSTMENTS and finally REPLACE COLOR:
You will get a dialog box that looks like this:
Lets go over what each of these settings do real quickly so you have a better overall understanding of this filter.
Selection: Eyedropper, Eyedropper "Plus" and Eyedropper "Minus" - These allow you to add or remove colors from the original image (on the original canvas NOT the version you see in the dialog box) that will be adjusted.
Fuzziness - This adjusts how precisely you want the color change to apply to the exact color you've chosen. The higher you make it the more additional colors that will be included in the adjustment. For "painted" graphics like the one we are using for this tutorial you will most likely not go below the default setting of 40. I like to play with the setting to see how many of the similar colors I can get in there before using the Eyedropper "Plus" tool.
Selection or Image - This basically asks if you want this color replacement to apply only to that color within a selection you've created (with your wand tool, etc..) or if you want the color replacement to apply to that color throughout the image. By default it is set to selection and that is what I always use.
Under REPLACEMENT you see Hue (adjust the Color) Saturation ( adjust how bold the color is ) and Lightness (adjust how light the color is). For a more in-depth description of these attributes feel free to check out my Basic Colors tutorial.
Finally, its time to replace the colors =o)
As you see here, I adjusted the fuzziness to 163. There is a lot of purple in this dress so a higher number works well to pick out a lot of the purples for a quick recolor.
All of the white areas are the colors to be adjusted:
A larger example =o)
Adjusting the HUE toward a bluer color I notice that my fuzziness didn't pick up some of the purple highlights in the dress.
I am not really enthusiastic about purple highlights on a blue dress. So I use the Eyedropper PLUS tool under SELECTION to add that shade of purple to the colors being adjusted. Ive placed the cursor over the EYEDROPPER PLUS tool so you see which one I used. I then clicked on the purple highlight in the original image. Note that the foreground color changes to the purple you've picked out from the highlights in the dress.
You can try using the eyedropper plus tool to pick up more colors and mess around, but usually that gets icky if the colors are too different. So what I recommend doing instead, is saving what you've got so far by clicking "OK". Now use your eyedropper tool to pick out another color (lets do the yellow at the bottom of the dress) and go into replace color again. As you see here, I lowered the fuzziness back to around 40 (theres not a whole lot of that yellow in the dress). I also adjusted the hue to an aquaish color and the lightness to make it lighter =o)
Now repeat these steps for each of the individual colors until you have something you like. Remember to adjust the fuzziness to affect more or less of the color range =o)
Here is what I decided on after changing the reddish color to match the green at the bottom:
Now you know just one of the MANY ways you can change colors in Photoshop. Make sure to check out my other tutorials on recoloring =o)
~Link Hearts Enchanted~
Links are definitely appreciated! Please feel free to right click to save one of these images to your hard drive and link them back to:
http://www.heartsenchanted.com
Thanks for your support!
