Some time ago, I wrote this article for PSD Magazine. It was published in a special Photoshop Starter issue of this magazine on January 2007. For those who didn’t have the chance of reading it, here´s the full article:
The Color Replacement brush is a tool that lets you paint with one color over another color, keeping the brightness and contrast of the image. This way you can easily change the color of an object without using complex masking and color correction tools.
We are going to replace the color of these beach parasols from blue to red and leave the yellow part untouched.
Select the Color Replacement brush from the tools palette.
Now let’s take a look at the preferences bar.
There are many settings you can change. In this case we will use the following: Brush Size: 50 px (Set the size of the brush according to the resolution of the image. You will need a medium to large brush for large areas, and a small one to paint the details). Mode: Hue. Sampling: Continuous (the first Eydropper icon). Limits: Discontiguous. Tolerance: 40%. Antialias: Unchecked. I will explain the meaning of these setting at the end of this tutorial.
Using a vivid red color as the foreground, start painting over of the beach parasol taking care that the center crosshair doesn’t leave the blue area that you are painting on. You don’t have to be very precise when using this tool. As you paint, it will only replace the colors that are stepped over by the crosshair, leaving the other colors untouched. In this case when the crosshair is over the blue color, the yellow colors will be left untouched.
There are some situations where the color to be replaced is similar to an adjacent color resulting in unwanted areas being painted. The solution to this problem is to decrease the brush size and paint with a little more care.
You may need to repeat the process until you acquire some practice, mostly with the difficult spots where two similar colors are very close. But it shouldn’t take long until you manage to replace the blue color from the beach parasols.
There is no need to go in depth with the Color Replacement tool settings. The settings we used in this tutorial are ok with most cases. Anyway, there are two settings that are worthy to be explored when you are using this tool for the first time.
The Mode setting has four options. The most useful are Hue and Color. If you choose Hue, you will replace only the tint (hue) of the underlying color and the saturation and luminosity will remain untouched. But if you choose Color as the painting mode, you will replace both the hue and saturation of the underlying color leaving the luminosity without any changes.
The other setting is the Tolerance. It works much like the paint bucket and wand tools tolerance setting. With a large tolerance the Color Replacement tool will paint over colors that are distant to the one being sampled by the brush tip crosshair. On the contrary, if you choose a small tolerance, only the colors that are close to the sampled color will be replaced.
That’s all you need to know to start using this wonderful and fun tool. When you become more familiar with it, you will be able to explore other settings and you will find that it is perhaps the easiest way of changing colors in a photograph.
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February 20, 2009 at 12:43 am
AWESOME LOVE IT THANKS
February 20, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Good tip!
February 21, 2009 at 5:49 am
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February 21, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Awesome tips. Thanks!
February 21, 2009 at 8:54 pm
It would be more helpful if you gave the version of PS you are using right at the beginning. My brush tool doesn’t have a “color replacement”.
February 22, 2009 at 1:05 am
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February 22, 2009 at 8:47 am
Excellent , Very usefull,,,,,,,, Thankyouuuuuuuu
February 24, 2009 at 11:24 am
Is there a way to turn things black? I’ve been trying to do this for days but i can’t figure it out. It just turned my object gray. Thanks.
February 26, 2009 at 5:44 am
[...] Easily Replace a Color in Your Photos [...]
March 2, 2009 at 10:31 am
Excellent, thank you so much
March 2, 2009 at 1:55 pm
No more masking and painstakingly selecting an area to change the color for me. This tut. saved me a lot of time & headaches! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
March 2, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Terrific tip…..works on my Apple version of Photoshop Elements! Thanks!
March 2, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Was wondering long for what that color replacement tool was meant.Very educative and since experiencing it for the first time, find it very useful.
March 3, 2009 at 12:02 am
Very Good
March 6, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Hello.
I’m brazilian. My inglish é bad. rss
so, I like your tutorial, but I have one question: If the objetc Will White? Who want I Do?
thanks
March 15, 2009 at 9:00 am
Wow I can’t even tell the difference this is really good!
March 16, 2009 at 6:38 am
This is great. thanks a lot
March 19, 2009 at 3:02 am
[...] Easily Replace Color (all versions of PSCS) [...]
March 28, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Just plain doesn’t work for me. I have Photoshop CS3 and followed all the examples exactly, multiple times. I selected to paint over a red area with a dark blue and it only painted light blue. It also doesn’t stop at the edge of the red. I have a picture with red in the middle, surrounded by gray and brown. It paints right over the other colors, even when the cross in the middle stays in the red.
Seems like a great idea but there are obviously steps that need to be done that aren’t being explained.
March 31, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Thats greate
i am very greatful for ur tips
thanks
April 4, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Works great but it never selects the color I choose. It’s aways gray. Same with the “enhance” color replacement tool. It’s always gray. :-(
I’m very frustrated with this product. I can’t say I’ll keep using it. Other products seem much more intuitive and actually seem to work.
April 5, 2009 at 4:05 pm
hey, i tried this earlier and it worked fine, but i just tried it again now and all it does is remove the color from everything.. like makes it go black n white.. im not sure if theres a setting elsewere that i may have changed, but any ideas??
April 6, 2009 at 5:27 am
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May 10, 2009 at 2:39 pm
A really handy tip to speed up photo retouching work. A lot easier than the traditional masking techniques used.
July 24, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Excellent tutorial, all steps very well done.
July 29, 2009 at 12:33 am
This is very useful for indecisive clients. I’ve used it lots.
August 4, 2009 at 1:51 pm
worked fine in CS4, thanks, a great time saver!
August 10, 2009 at 6:58 am
Nice one for this. very good tutorial and simple to follow :)
August 18, 2009 at 3:37 pm
very clear and simple.
now the question: can i color BW pics ?
August 25, 2009 at 7:56 am
Да, автор блога молодец! Пишите еще!
September 2, 2009 at 1:00 am
Great tutorial, thanks for this!! Never saw that tool before even if using PS since many years, shame on me :-)
September 12, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Thanks. Been wondering how that’s done.
October 5, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Doesn’t seem to work in CS3… or maybe it doesn’t like to paint over white. I’m trying to change a white backdrop in a portrait and the only thing it paints over is the colors in the person.
October 20, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Thank you, i’ve never used this tool (I know… it’s a shame)
November 19, 2009 at 11:30 am
[...] Easily replace a color in your photos [...]