I recently photographed the beach huts at Southwold.
And from those shots this is the one that I want to use.
The only problem is that I want the red stripes on the hut in the center to be blue.
This is an ideal job for the affinity photo color replacement brush.
You'll find the brush in the tools pallet over on the left of the screen.
It's grouped with the other tools like them regular paintbrush. So you may find one of those is visible instead.
If it is click the small gray triangle to the bottom right of the icon.
This displays the other tools in the group, allowing you to select the color replacement brush.
After selecting the brush, we need to choose the new color to replace the red.
This should be a similar color to the other beaches on either side.
The way to do this is by double clicking the color swatch at the bottom of a tools palette.
This opens the color picker dialog, where we can then choose a new color to use.
I'll create this from the color of the beach on the right.
All I need to do is click the sampling tool with my mouse.
Then whilst holding down the mouse button, drag it over the color that I want to sample.
You can see that this displays a magnified area over the sample point.
When I released the mouse button, the sample color appears next to the eyedropper icon in the dialog.
If I then click that it sets the color of the dialog.
Now I'm using the Hue setting for the dialog rather than one of
the other options because it makes the next step easier.
I can now click and drag the color point to choose a new color
, which has the same hue component as the sample.
Move it up or down to change the lightness of the color. All left and right to change the stauration.
With the new color selected. Let's duplicate the background image layer just in case something goes wrong.
The color replacement brush is a destructive edit. So it's going to change the pixels of the image.
By working on a copy layer we still have the original if we need to start again.
We can copy the layer by right Clicking it in the late studio panel and then choosing the duplicate option.
Alternatively, you can press Cmd and J on a Mac or Ctrl and J on a windows PC.
Now we're ready to paint over the red stripes of the beach hut.
To do this position the centre of the brush over the red panel.
We then see a preview of how it'll look if we applied the brush.
This lasts a couple of seconds and then vanishes, unless we keep moving the brush.
Now click once and hold down the mouse button.
As we then move the brush along the red Stripe. It changes to the new color.
What's happening is that when I clicked affinity photo sample the color of the image at the center of the brush.
It then identifies any pixels with a similar color that fall
inside the brush circumference and it changes those to the new color.
What's controlling whether a pixel is deemed to be the same color or not.
Is the tolerance slider in the toolbar. The smaller the
tolerance the closer to the color of the pixels need to be to be a match.
If we use a big number, then the color doesn't need to be as close.
But there's something else that's happening here and that I want you to be aware of.
When I click on one of the red panels and paint over it, only that stripe is changed.
It doesn't seem to matter that my brush covers other red panels.
The reason is I have the contiguous option ticked in the toolbar.
Let's undo the last change now by pressing Cmd and Z, or Ctrl and Z on a Windows PC, I can
then repaint the area but without the contiguous option ticked.
Notice this time that it's changing the other red stripes as well.
Because the stripe I've been painting over was surrounded by white, the contiguous option was
restricting the color change to that Stripe.
You can probably see this more clearly, if I paint around the area of the window shutter, when
the contiguous option is off, it changes the color of the shutter.
Let undo do that now and repeat it with the contiguous option on.
This time it ignores the window because it's surrounded by white.
It's only if I move the center of my brush over the window that it's color changes.
Now we need to look closely at the results because there's something else that I want you to notice.
The brush hasn't replaced all the areas of red, and has left a small strip below the window.
That's because this area isn't a close enough color match to the area where I first clicked.
One way to prevent this from happening is to increase the tolerance slider.
Let's undo the change and repeat it, but using a 30% tolerance.
Whilst this seems to fix the problem, it can also create others.
For example, notice that even though I have a contiguous
option ticked the brush now paints over the window.
That's because it's detecting similar pixels in the white surround that make it think the area is contiguous.
We can also see that it paints over the concrete wall to change the red pixels there.
Let's undo that now and look at what happens when we reduce a tolerance to 5%.
This time the brush doesn't recolor all the red areas.
This is one reason why you should spend a little bit of time checking the tolerance before painting.
All you need to do is move the brush over the area and you can check the preview.
Now there's one final important point you need to know.
The brush only replaces colors with a color of a similar intensity.
You may have noticed that whilst I'd been painting the white boards haven't been affected.
That's partly because I sent the sample color to red when I first clicked.
But watch what happens if I start sampling one of the white boards.
It still doesn't change the color. That's because white doesn't have a color to replace now
compare this to the sky, which has a slight blue tint.
When I paint over that, you can see that it's replaced by a pale blue color with a similar intensity.
This means that you can't use this technique to change the color of anything that's black, white or gray.
It only works with color. Now there is one further feature
of the brush that we haven't used which is the continuous sampling.
To learn how that works and have it can help you achieve better results.
Watch this video next. Thanks for watching today.
And I hope you've enjoyed the video. Don't forget to subscribe If you haven't
already and you'll find lots more
tutorials on my website. I'll see you soon.