Now, in this video, I want to show you something that I originally recorded
for the Free Photoshop Virtual Summit 5 which shows two ways that you can
use Photoshop to match the color of different things
within a picture.
Now, there may be times
when you need or want to match the color of something in your pictures.
It might be a specific color you need to change something to,
or you might like I say, be looking to match the color of items.
So remembering that there isn't one technique for every occasion,
I'm going to show you two ways that you can match or change colors.
So I'll use this photograph here of me and my friend Steve Healey
from when we took a trip
to take photographs down to a place called Botallack in Cornwall,
which you might recognize if you're a Poldark fan.
Let's just say that I want to match the color of my jacket with that of Steve's.
The first thing I would need to do is to make a selection and cut out of my jacket.
Now, I'm not going to make you sit there and wait whilst I do go through that.
I've actually done one already, which you can see here in the channels tab.
So I need to load this channel as a selection.
I can do that by either holding down the command on Mac or control
on Windows and clicking directly on the channel thumbnail.
Or just go back to the normal layers view
and go to select load selection and choose the Glyn Jacket
channel and click okay.
Now we see the active selection.
I'll hold down the command key on Mac or Control key on Windows and Press
J to create a copy of the selected area up onto a new layer.
You can see that now if I turn the layer below off and on.
Okay, so the next thing I'll do is grab the lasso tool
and make a loose selection of an area of my jacket.
Something like this will do.
It only needs to be a small area.
Then once I have that, I'll hold down the command and option
keys on Mac or the control and alt keys on windows.
And when I position the cursor within the selection,
we get this double arrowhead symbol.
When I have that, I keep the keys pressed down
and drag the selection over onto the area I want to colour match,
which in this case is my friend Steve's jacket.
I’ll position it around here.
Okay, now that's done.
I'll go to select and de Select to turn off the active selection.
So now we kind of have a Swatch and if I go to the channels tab,
we can see that swatch in each of the red,
green and blue channels.
So now if I blend that swatch, so the it kind of disappears in each of those red,
green and blue channels, that would mean that the color values match.
So in which case that would have changed the color of my jacket.
Let me show you.
So I click on the Red Channel,
then go to image adjustments and curves,
and when I do, the curves opens up in the red channel.
So looking at the swatch, I need to brighten this one.
So it blends in better and almost disappears.
To do that, I drag this point
here on the curves and drag slowly across to the left
until, like I say, it starts to blend in and kind of disappear.
It won't disappear completely because you're kind of aware that
it's there, but you just need to get it as close as possible.
and I tend to find a squinting as I do this does help.
So about there should be fine
and I'll click on Okay.
Next we need to work on the Green channel.
So I click on the Green Channel, then go to image
adjustments curves and it opens in the Green channel straight away.
In this channel I need to darken the swatch
so I'll drag this points in the curve directly downwards,
slowly until the swatch blends in as much as possible
and again squinting as I do it.
So about there would be good.
Lastly, we've got the blue channel,
so I click on the blue channel and then I'll bring up the curves.
And rather than going to the image menu, I could also just use
the keyboard shortcuts of command on Mac or control on Windows
and the letter M for Curves, which makes no sense at all.
But hey,.
The Curves Properties opens in the blue channel and this one
I need to darken so again,
I drag this top right point downward slowly until it blends in.
And yeah, about there is good enough.
So let's now see what this has done.
I'll click on the RGB full composite color channel, then go to the Layers
panel and double click on the hand tool in the toolbar to zoom out.
So we've changed it to red, but we just need to adjust it slightly now
and we can do that by adding a levels adjustment layer.
We also need to make this a clipping mask so that what we now do
only affects the jacket layer directly below and nothing else.
So I click on the clipping mask icon
and we can see the clipping mask symbol now linking the layers together.
Then it's just a case of using these five points
here, adjusting them until we get to where we're happy.
So somewhere
around about here.
So that's one way of matching color.
Let's now look at another way that we can match or change the color of something.
I'll delete these layers here, so we go back to the original image.
Now I'll change the color of my jacket again.
But this time, first of all, I'm going to add a new group
by clicking on the new group icon at the bottom of the Layers panel
and I'll rename it Color.
Then I'll load
the selection I made of my jacket
and click to add a layer mask.
Now this adds a layer mask to the group, which means any layers inside
that group are only visible in the white part of the mask,
which in this case would mean only being visible on my jacket.
Next, I'll add a solid color fill layer.
We have the color picker now where I can choose a color
by dragging up and down on this sidebar here and then adjust
the saturation and brightness by dragging this bigger area here.
Up to go brighter down, to go darker
left to reduce saturation and right to add saturation.
If I knew the color, space values or even the hex code,
I could manually put those in.
I could even bring the cursor out, which then becomes a color sampler
and click on the image itself to sample a color from it.
In this case, I'll just click on an area of Steve's jacket.
When I do that color is now sampled in the new section here and we see
it applied to my jacket in real time,
but we can't see any detail at the moment.
All we can see is the color.
So we need to use a blend mode and we have a choice of two to use
hue and color.
Now, if we use color, that takes the hue and saturation of the colors
that we've been sampled and uses the brightness value from the jacket
and we can then use the big area here and drag up
and down, left and right to alter the brightness and saturation.
And that might work well on most images.
Or we could just use the hue blend mode
where it's just the color only that's being added.
You'll notice then that we can't adjust the brightness
or saturation from within the solid colorful layer.
Instead, I'll add a levels adjustment
and then use any or all of these five areas to adjust it.
And this way I actually prefer because I think the result looks much more realistic
when used on this image, but it could be very different on another image,
which is why it's always good to know more than one way to do the same thing.
Now with Photoshop
in Photoshop, there are always more ways to do exactly the same thing.
But I just wanted to
take a few minutes of your time to show you two of my favorite ways.
Now, one extra thing to let you know before I go On Wednesday,
the 6th of December 2023 at 6 p.m.
UK time.
I'm doing a free webinar hosted by Calibrite,
going through how to correctly calibrate your display
and how to get perfect prints every single time.
Whether you're using an Epson or a Canon printer.
Here's the link to register an even if you can't watch on the day.
Make sure you register anyway because you'll get sent a link
to the recording 24 hours after the live webinar has finished.
Right.
That's all I have for this video. So as always,
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But that's all I've got for you. I'll catch you in the next video.