Color Changing

This tutorial shows you various ways you can change the colors and shades of your image, including the color, contrast, brightness, and saturation.

Click to enlarge

This is our sample image:

Click to enlarge

Step 1

The simplest way to change colors in photoshop would be to edit the hue and saturation. To do this, go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation… (Ctrl + U)

Step 2

Now you see the Hue and Saturation box. From here you can move the hue slider to change the color, the saturation slider to change the amount of color, and lightness slider to change how dark or light the image is. The colorize box takes out all the color and replaces it with whatever color you pick with the hue slider. This is helpful for coloring black and white images.

Click to enlarge

Step 3

Now lets learn how to change the contrast and brightness of our image. To edit the contrast and brightness go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast…

Step 4

This brings up the Brightness and Contrast box. The contrast slider changes the difference between the light and dark areas, and the brightness changes how bright or dark the colors are.

Click to enlarge

Step 5

Now lets look at some other more advanced ways to change color

If you want to change the specific colors of the shadows, midtones, and highlights of an image then you can use color balance.

Step 6

From here you can change the color of the shadows (darker areas), midtones (medium colors) and highlights (lighter areas). To achieve this image:

Click to enlarge

I used:

Shadows: -100 cyan, +30 green, and +35 blue
Midtones: -80 cyan, 0 magenta/green, -80 yellow
Highlights: -15 cyan, 0 magenta/green, +100 blue

Step 7

Another way to edit the color of an image is to use variations. To go to variations, go to Image -> Adjustments -> Variations…

Step 8

Once here you can make the saturation midtones, highlights, or shadows more green, more yellow, more cyan, more red, more blue, more magenta, or make the image lighter or darker. Although this isn't very good for getting specific colors, it gives you a pretty good average and is fun to fool around with while trying to find good colors

There you go, you now know several ways to change the color of your image, as well as making it lighter or dark and how to change the contrast.

Click to enlarge