Selectively changing colors

- [Instructor] Okay, so we've been moving along nicely, and in the previous movie, made a selection that involved hair and managed to get through that okay. But what we need to do now is change a color, because it so turns out that purple is the color of our main competitor for our backpack client. So we need to kind of deal with that. So what we're going to do first of all is, we're going to make that layer active, because there's a chance, if you did exactly what I did in the previous movie, that it won't be active.

So you click on a layer, and that way, Photoshop knows which layer to work on. We're then going to go up to the select menu and come down and choose this command, color range. And a dialog will open, it may or may not go black. I've got a pretty good selection there, funny that. (laughs) But what you need to is, just come along here and choose none. Just in case you're wondering why mine went black, it's because the first thing it looks for is the foreground color, and my foreground color, when I'm not painting in a mask, is this color, which is very close to that magenta, just so you know.

So inside this dialog, what we have to do is, we identify in our image the color we want to select. And we start off by just clicking once, in a fairly representative area of that color. Now, our mask here shows us what we're picking up, at the moment, just a small edge there, on what would be her left hand, and a bit here where I clicked. We need to add some tones to that. No need to add too many, but if you hold down shift, there is a set of tools here to add and subtract by the way, but it's easier if you can to hold down shift, and so I can see down here, there should be some selected, so I'll just click in that region there, and just along here, and then just up towards the top here.

And you can see, the selection's growing. But it's not very easy to work that out between those two things. So we've got something that can help us. We've got a couple of different mattes here that can work. If we chose white matte, for example, we'd get a white mask showing through. But I don't think that one's very helpful for this image. I'm going to choose a black matte, and that's now much easier to see. And you can hopefully see, just at the top of the first index knuckle here, that's not selected, so I'm going to hold down the shift key, that bit's really important, and click in that region.

And suddenly, that selection has improved, no end. I think that's pretty good. One last tweak, and that's to come up here to the fuzziness slider. And you see, if I drag this away a bit, right like so, that it improves the selection. You may also start to pick up other bits of the image, and that's when you back off. But I like to go right the way up to extremes, like so, and then back off until everything disappears, apart from the stuff that I want.

Once we've done that, hit OK. And now, you have that as a selection. And what we're going to do is, use a layer adjustment to change this color. So come over to the right-hand side, where all of your panels are, and you should find adjustments, just there. If not, go to the window menu, and choose adjustments from that menu. And in the rows here, we're going to go for the first item on the second row. And that creates us a hue/saturation adjustment layer.

Click on that, and your properties panel will open. And you'll get some representations of the color wheel in flat form. So what we're going to do is, drag the hue across, and you can see how the color changes. And I'm going to go for a fairly dark orange. Maybe not quite that dark, just going to push back a little bit there. You can change the saturation, very rarely do you need to change the lightness, and in fact, I advise that, most of the time, you stay away from that.

Just going to drop the saturation slightly, maybe push that hue just a bit further back, just trying to make some variation there. Brilliant, happy with that. The only thing is, that will actually be affecting areas underneath this layer, if this layer mask wasn't active. And what you could do to make that a certainty is just click this icon here, and that clips that adjustment so it only directly affects the selected layer underneath. There you go, doing really well! Let's have a look at what's coming along in the next movie.