Excerpted from Deke’s Techniques on lynda.com.
Whether you’re aiming for realism or an exaggerated effect that grabs attention, it’s often handy to be able to change the color of one object in a photo without affecting the rest of the image. Most people will tell you to use Adobe Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation command to do this, but if the object you’re changing has hue variations — not just one flat shade of red, for example — this relative adjustment won’t work.
Instead, you need to make an absolute adjustment. And to limit the change to a single object, you also need a mask. “A mask?” you gripe. “They take forever!”
Au contraire. You simply create a new Adjustment layer, select a color range inside the image with a click and a drag, and Photoshop will auto-generate your mask. Then you choose the Hue/Saturation command and make your color adjustments.
In the video below, I’ll demonstrate this better, more flexible way to take a red car and turn it gold without affecting the rest of the image.
Visit Deke’s Techniques for more Photoshop and Illustrator creative how-to projects in about 10 minutes.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on October 31, 2011
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