hey guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today today you're
not gonna see my face lucky you what we're gonna do today is change colours in photoshop
one thing that I get asked all of the time is how do you change colours in photos how can you change
green to autumn or fall colours and this has been something that's come up on a quite a few online
one-to-ones recently in terms of how to alter the colours so to give you guys the answer to
that part of kind of the workflow I'm going to cover that off on this picture today so this is
basically as it was shot out of the camera this is a picture of Cara who is a lovely little old
border collie all I have done is I've just done a clean up so I've just removed some of the
little bits hanging about which is what I would normally do and then what I would tend to do is
get my colours ready so I know in this particular image that I want to basically change everything
that is green to like autumn colour like brown so that I've removed how many colours we've got
going on in here now there is yellow red green on the log there is green everywhere else there
is some yellow on her she's like 4 000 colours for some reason so she's got loads of magenta up
here and then loads of green cast from whatever this was that was in front of the camera there
who knows what that was but clearly I had my head in a tree so on this particular image what we're
going to do is a few specific steps and we're going to end up with a beautiful autumnal scene
the first step of this is to make sure you've done your clean-up and all sorts of other stuff
and then we need to set the white balance now you guys know from my other YouTube videos that
I non-destructively edit so I don't destructively edit my images and therefore what I actually do
is convert my main editing image to a smart object that packages the file inside a protective cover
for lack of a better word and allows you to stack filters on top of it and go back and change them
so with that now converted to a smart object visible by the little paper symbol thing there
then the next thing that we do is go to filter and camera raw filter and that opens
essentially Lightroom in Photoshop Adobe camera raw in Photoshop so then I need to
take a white balance now this dog is white and black and therefore it's quite straightforward
she should not be this shade of pink on her head so what I would tend to do is just grab hold of
the white balance adjuster on a black and white dog find an area that should be middle grey now
for us that is going to be the top of the head where the light connects so sometimes it's on the
back sometimes it's the top of the head if you've got warm sunlight on one side and cool shade on
the other pick an area from the cool shade because blue is a lot worse than orange in most people's
opinion I think so I'm gonna basically pick a section of her head which technically will put
the white balance to being correct now that theoretically is the correct white balance
I don't wholeheartedly agree with that but I mean apparently that's right so I was definitely in a
tree but I mean technically that is supposedly the right colour maybe still magenta but we will just
have to handle that I think at a later date so with your collar basically picked and then come
down into the hue saturation and luminance section here and within the hues what I want to try and do
is equalize the yellows with the greens so that it just makes my adjustments easier so I'm going to
try and push the yellows towards green which has worked perfectly so let me undo that for you if
you look down here can you see that there's like it goes from like warm orange to yellow to green
what I want is it to go from my orange to green so to do that if I pull my yellow towards green
what it does is it puts all of the yellow bits into the green colour channel
now yes that does alter the colour of the dog so if you had a golden Labrador for example
you would be careful about pulling that over to be fair all it's changing is the colour cast
nothing else so I'm okay with that so I'm gonna move that all the way over into the green section
which gives us basically a green picture now because of how much of this foreground was in
then I'm going to go over to luminance and bring down the greens there not massively just a bit and
then the same with the yellows so that just calms things down a bit for me and will help when I
change these to orange then within the saturation I need to make sure that green and yellow are
quite highly saturated so that I have more room to play with in terms of the pixels so when you
get to this point you can then run your other adjustments which for me is always a double
radial within Adobe camera raw one working on the background there and I do same things all the time
I feel like I'm really predictable maybe I am I don't know so I do basically the same things
all the time so I'm happy with that and then I make a new radial which you just have to do off
to one side now on the new version of Photoshop I will I just basically reset my correction settings
invert and then I'm just going to lift up the exposure in that section and up the texture
a little bit you could also maybe lift the shadows a little bit to get some detail back
then that looks strange but we're all good we click okay and that puts our adjustments into
this image so as you can see we now look green as heck you know then and this is the changing of the
colour section what we're going to do is we're going to go for one of my normal methods which
is to add a new adjustment layer that adjustment layer will be a hue saturation adjustment layer
and within the hue saturation adjustment layer there is a hand icon if you click the hand icon
that will give you an eyedropper you want to pick the greenest of the green of the greens
like that and then you want to and this is quite important push your saturation
to a hundred and now we look like we've got some form of bad illness but that gives us a really
clear look at the colours that we've got going on so we've got some more yellowy colour and then
we've got darker greens I'm fine with this but if you grab hold of the middle of your little slider
you can move it from side to side and it will show you what colours are selected there
now I'm deliberately going to go away from the colours that are on the log
and if you had like I don't know a yellow dog then you'd also come away from the yellow on
the dog but for now I'm kind of okay with that so basically what that's done is selected everything
that's green I then go into hue and pull that to the left because that puts us in the warmer
zone and I want to find an orange like so with our orange selected we need to just be careful not to
go too far but with a good orange going on we then bring the saturation back down to zero and just
like that we have technically changed the colours now I personally also like to pull the lightness
of that colour down and then play with the saturation to get to a stage that I'm happy with
I think that I need to split this maybe into two different ones because I'm quite happy with the
colour of that apart from on the more yellowy areas so I'm going to stop with this adjustment
right now and I'm just going to overlay it with another one so I'm going to do hue saturation I'm
going to use my little drippy dropper picker thing click in an area of this very yellow
and now we can see a difference in the colour so we've got orange yellow a bit of green
yellow green over here and moving over into orange in the coat so what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna get hold of that and I'm gonna try and isolate what I want to change what I will
do is I will break that down so you can bring the edges in of this little slider tool here
and essentially shrink your selection window but I can get either more of the orange or more of the
green so I'm going to let some of those oranges slip through maybe to there and then I'm going
to bring that over and make them orange and then bring my saturation back and that's just tackled
the residual greens so I'm hoping you guys can see that so in terms of what I'm going
to do next with this I'm just going to pull that side out a little bit more I'm going to put my
saturation back up so that I can see because I just want to have a little bit more
in that selection you can always tell when I'm concentrating because I go really quiet so what
I'm wanting to do is basically just fine tune where those are on my colour spectrum I might go
back to my original one which by the way if you go back to another one if you click on the adjustment
icon and then go up you will have to find the colour that was moved so we've moved green so if
we go into greens that is our adjustment there so we can then go and fine tune so if I pull
them slightly more remember that your adjustments stack so if I change something on this one it also
changes something on this one so that's picking up the residual greens a little bit more now
and I'm probably going to want to go into the yellows on that one and potentially pull them more
and then what I think I'm gonna do on this one actually is bring bring them down quite a lot
I just want to get to a stage that I'm happy with the colours involved
I think for me I'm going to desaturate this but that's just because of this picture you know
okay so let's see what our before and after is
I'd say that's pretty major change right there and at this stage you would then start to mask
out your subject so I'm hoping that you guys will watch the masking video how to mask hair
which is vital go ahead and look at that up linked above so with those two adjustments
done then it's up to you to finish your image you can style it however you want to style it
I hope that this has helped give you a bit of another option or a new technique that you might
not have tried there are other colour changing techniques available I use other ones but this
one tends to work sort of the quickest the easiest and the best in terms of changing full colours try
this out tag me in some of your results I hope this has been helpful for you if it has please
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week and sometimes more than if I feel like it and if I have time so yeah I'll see you again soon