Creating a tight, accurate selection is the most challenging part of changing the color of an object in an image in Photoshop. You don't want to leave any pixels bleeding outside the edge of your selection making it obvious that a color was changed. So why bother making a selection at all when you can use this handy trick from Colin Smith at PhotoshopCAFE?
While there are tons of videos demonstrating various techniques to change colors in Photoshop, this tutorial demonstrates how incredibly easy the software makes it to change the color of an object, even if it's surrounded by elements that make it nearly impossible to create an accurate selection, such as splashing water. Smith skips the selection process entirely, and focuses on using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and some additional masking to convincingly change the color to very specific parts of the photograph.
The masking allows the user to easily "paint" over areas of the image where they want to retain the original color. The video is short, clocking in under 6 minutes and the process itself can easily take even less time depending on what needs to be changed.
What technique do you use to change colors in Photoshop? Does this tutorial offer an easier way to accomplish the same thing? Drop a comment below and tell us about your process.
This was pretty useful, concise, and informative
lol what's the difference between creating an selections and painting out fishes at the end of the video?: P
Heck of a lot easier than masking the skirt and the text through all the water. And the fish was optional, to demonstrate the flexibility of the technique, I could have just as easily not added the fish to the composite if I wanted to make the tutorial "easy (aka fake)"