Hi. Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel. com
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to change the color of a background in Photoshop.
This Photoshop tutorial will show you an advanced technique but don't worry if you are a beginner,
this is a step-by-step tutorial, and I will go slow so that you could follow along no
matter your experience level. I'm using the latest version of Photoshop,
but you could still follow along with Photoshop CS6, I will mention any differences in the video.
Also, if you want to download the file that
I'm using for practice, then look below in the description for the link to the tutorial
image. But of course, you can use any image that
you like as long as it has either a white or a light gray background.
If your image doesn't, then I have a tutorial on making white backgrounds that you could
watch before this one. I'll place the link down below in the description.
Once you get your white background, you can come back and follow this tutorial.
Okay. Let's get started.
This is the image that we will work with in this video.
Our model is up against a gray background and what we're going to do is change the background
color to any color that we want. The first step is to isolate the main subject
so that the color change doesn't affect anything else but the background.
There's a lot of ways of making selections in Photoshop.
If you're in an older version like Photoshop CS6, what you can do is select the Quick Selection
Tool and simply click-and-drag over her to make a selection.
Notice that Photoshop is automatically finding the edges.
If you accidentally click over an area that you didn't intend to select, what you can
do is hold alt on Windows, Option in the Mac and click-and-drag to subtract from the selection.
And let me show you now what to do if you're in a new version of Photoshop.
I'll press Ctrl+D on Windows, Command+D on the Mac to de-select.
If you're in the Creative Cloud, what you can do is go into Select and Subject.
This command will use artificial intelligence, machine learning technology known as Adobe
Sensei to find the main subject of your image and select it.
The selection will not be perfect, but it is a great starting point and time-saver.
Next you can refine the selection with the Quick Selection Tool.
Again, you can hold alt on Windows, Option in the Mac and click-and-drag to subtract
from the selection, and simply click-and-drag over any area to add to the selection.
Make sure that you spend some time fine-tuning and refining your selection to make sure that
everything is selected properly. When you're done with the selection, you can
press the Q key on the keyboard to enter the Quick Mask mode.
With this mode, you can paint with the Brush Tool to add or subtract to the selection.
So, I can select the Brush Tool and then either use white to reveal or black to conceal.
Let me show you what I mean by that. I'm gonna zoom into the laces.
I tap in the Z key to enable the Zoom Tool. Then I'll tap on the B key to bring back the
Brush, and I can use the left and right brackets on the keyboard to adjust my Brush Size.
And now, if I select black as my foreground color by clicking on this icon and paint on
the mask, notice that I bring the red overlay onto that area.
If I press the Q key again, you will see now how the area that I painted on is no longer
selected. So you can keep tapping on the Q key, painting
on areas that shouldn't be selected, and move from there.
For the sake of time, I'm not going to fine-tune the selection, but I recommend that you do.
Just look for the areas that shouldn't be selected and paint with black to de-select
and paint with white to select, like I'm doing here.
And by the way, I just tapped on the X key on the keyboard, which swaps the foreground
and background colors. So white reveals pixels and I'll tap on the
X key again to set my foreground color to black and black conceals pixels.
And that's what the red overlay indicates. When you're done, you can press on the Q key
again to bring the selection back. I'm going to double click on the hand tool
to fit the image to the screen and what I'll do now is refine the selection even further.
With the Quick Selection Tool active, I can then click on the Select And Mask button to
continue fine-tuning the mask.
I'm currently in the Black & White view that basically shows me what the mask will look
like. White reveals, black conceals.
And what I'm gonna do here is zoom into this area so that you can see that the mask is
extremely jaggy, so I'm going to use this Smooth slider to smooth it out a bit, like
so. Notice it is much smoother than it was before
and I'll increase the Contrast to make it sharper.
Then I'll press OK. Notice that I did not make any adjustments
to her hair, the reason is that I wanted to adjust it with a separate adjustment to get
better results. The edges around her hair are very different
than the edges around her body, so we apply the same adjustments to both.
The resulting mask will not look very good, instead, apply two separate adjustments.
The first will take care of the edges around her body and the second will take care of
the edges around her hair.
So what I'll do now is go back into the Select And Mask and just work on the hair.
I can switch the view to Overlay and I can use the Refined Edge Tool.
I can increase the size by tapping on the right bracket key and I'm just gonna click-and-drag
on here to select her hair. Much, much better than what I had before.
See how Photoshop is now trying to select her hair and mask out the background? That's
exactly what I want. And I didn't wanna do this in the previous
step because I didn't want to apply the smoothing or the contrast to the edge pixels of her
hair. Then I can press OK and now I have a much
better selection. I'll double click on the hand tool to fit
the image to the screen. Next I'm gonna go into the Fill and Adjustment
Layer icon and create a solid color Fill Layer.
And this Fill Layer allows me to pick whatever color that I want.
I'm going to pick a blue color, maybe like this one and I'll press OK.
Notice that this blue is affecting my model and not the background.
Well, I can fix that by clicking on the Layer Mask and either pressing Ctrl+I on Windows,
or Command+I on the Mac to invert or go into the Properties panel and click on this Invert
Button. When you do that, the blue is now affecting
the background and not my model. The problem now is that we lost her shadows
and we lost the floor. So let's bring those back by changing the
Blending mode from this dropdowns. So these Blending modes allow you to blend
your current layer with the layers below. The Blending mode that we're going to choose
is called Multiply. And notice how that brings the background
back and the floor.
The floor shouldn't be blue, so let's mask that out by using the Rectangular Marquee
Tool and I'm just gonna click-and-drag to make a selection around the floor like so.
I'm going to make sure that the Layer Mask is selected and I'm going to Fill with Black.
There's a couple ways that you can do that. You can go into Edit, Fill, and select Black.
Better yet use the keyboard shortcut. Notice that black is my background color so
I can Fill with Black by pressing Ctrl+backspace on Windows, that's Command+backspace on the
Mac. Then I can press Ctrl+D, Command+D to de-select.
From this point, you should fine-tune the layer mask.
For example, notice that I missed this area here so you can do the same thing you did
earlier, you can select the Brush Tool and paint with either white or black on the layer
mask.
White reveals the coloring effect, black conceals the coloring effect.
So if you wanna hide the blue, make sure that you paint with black on the layer mask to
hide. Black is my background color so I can press
the X key to swap it to my foreground and I can paint accordingly.
Obviously, I'm going very quickly here, you might wanna spend a little more time fine-tuning
the mask, but this is all you have to do. I'll double click on the Hand Tool to fit
the image to the screen. Now you might be wondering why I use a solid
color Fill Layer instead of a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer.
Well, the reason is that the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer only gives me one slider
to control the brightness of the image and I am gonna show you an advanced technique
that gives you five control points for the brightness.
But before I do that, I wanna show you that you can double click on the Color Fill Layer
thumbnail and then adjust the color to anything that you want, like so.
This layer might be good enough for all your needs and that's okay.
What I'm gonna do now is an advanced step that I didn't show in the previous tutorial.
So what you wanna do is create a group, and I'm gonna call this group Color Change and
I'm gonna drag this Color Fill Layer into that group and I want the Color Change layer
to have the same layer mask that this Color Fill has.
So I'm gonna click-and-drag it and drop it onto the group.
And notice now that the Color Fill no longer has a layer mask, but the Color Change group
does, and that's what I want.
And the reason that I'm doing this is so that one Layer Mask controls the contents of that
group. What I'll do now is create a Levels Adjustment
Layer and click the Color Fill Layer to the very top so that the Levels is at the bottom.
Then I'll right-click and delete the Layer Mask because we don't need it, we just want
one layer mask to control everything in that group.
And the reason that I did this is to show you that you can control the brightness of
this image with these five points as opposed to just one slider.
So you have total control of how dark the shadows are, how bright they are, complete
control over the image. That's why I think this technique is much
better. So for example, if you wanted darker shadows,
you can click-and-drag this point to the right and the shadows are darker.
You're probably thinking, "Well. Yeah.
I made the shadows darker, but also I changed the wall color to a darker color.
So how do I keep the same color but make the shadows darker?" It's actually not that difficult.
I'm going to click on this group and create a new Layer and I actually created it inside
the group, lemme just drag it out, so it's outside of the group.
So now I have this layer outside of the group and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select
my Eyedropper Tool. The Eyedropper Tool allows you to sample a
color so I can click and set that color as my foreground color.
You see that there. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna paint
and before I paint I'll just disable the other layers so that you can see that I'm just gonna
paint with blue here, like so. See that? Just blue.
And I'm doing that so that we could reference that color when we make the shadows darker.
So I can go inside of the group, go back into the Levels Adjustment Layer, and make the
shadows darker. That makes the blue darker as well, but I
can brighten it up by clicking-and-dragging on the white point here and dragging in the
left. See that? So now I can match the brightness
that I had before and the shadows are darker. If you want to make the shadows brighter,
you can do so by dragging this point to the left.
Obviously, the rest of the background gets brighter and I can bring it back to the original
color by clicking-and-dragging this point to the left and matching it to where I had
before. So this gives you total control over the shadows
in your group.
So again, this is the advanced technique that I didn't show before.
You don't really need this Layer, so when you're done you can just click and drag it
into the trash icon to delete it. And again, everything we've done is editable.
You can always change the color to something else and you can always come and adjust the
mask if you notice that you missed some areas. For example, here in the hair, you might run
into difficulties if you select a darker color, like here.
And what you can do in this case is use the Dodge and Burn Tools to adjust it.
So if I select the Dodge Tool, I can click on the mask and then paint with it, which
makes those pixels brighter, therefore the color comes through.
So I can just paint, like so, to make those colors from the background come out.
And this obviously depends on the image that you're working with and the color that you
wanna turn the background into.
This is not really the color that I was going for, so I'm just gonna go back into the blue
color that I wanted for this image, which is a- blue right about here.
And just like that, you've changed the color of a background in Photoshop.
Now, if you enjoyed the tutorial and you think that it will help you and your creative projects,
then I would like to ask you for two quick favors.
First, please click on the Like button now and let me know in the comments below how
you plan on using this technique. And the second favor is to click on the Subscribe
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bell. I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial on changing
the color of a background in Photoshop. Thank you so much for watching.
I will talk to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial.