Pixels To Print: Recoloring Images in Photoshop

Have you ever had the perfect image in mind to use for a campaign or social post, but the colors in the photo don’t quite match up to the theme of your campaign? Or perhaps you’re just looking to visually mockup an object in a different color. You may love that bright red wall in your office, but what would it look like if it were a light blue instead? Well, I’m here to share with you the most effective that you can change or replace colors of an image in photoshop to help your vision come to life.

Create a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer

The easiest method to recolor an image is to adjust it through a hue/saturation layer. To do this, go to your layer panel and click on the ‘Add adjustment layer’ button at the bottom to select a Hue/Saturation layer. In the menu that comes up, you can adjust the settings to change the hue, saturation, and lightness of your image. With this method, the hue and saturation of each color in your current image will change. However, if you want the entire image to be one hue, toggle the “Colorize” box and start adjusting!

If you are looking to target just one specific color in the image, you can also use a hue/adjustment layer. Instead of coloring the entire image, click on the dropdown menu that says “Master” and select the color that you want to change. If you want to change this mint colored bag to purple, try adjusting just the cyan color selection first and play around with it until it’s the color that you are looking for! (You could also adjust the whole image and then go in with your brush tool on the adjustment layer to erase the areas that you don’t want affected!)

Alternatively, click on the eyedropper tool (shown as the pointer cursor symbol) to more easily select a specific and color range in your image.

The good thing about creating an adjustment layer is that it is easily changeable. You can turn it off if you decide not to use it, or you can change the color to something completely different in little time. Try out this method of recoloring images in Photoshop on your next project, and see how one photo can be turned into an entire new creation with just a few adjustments!