San's Graphic Blog

Use Selective Colors to change the color of a photo

October 6th, 2009 |

Author: San

Original for the Selective Colors Photoshop tutorial

This is the original photo I shoot in he morning in Hawaii, there was a lot of clouds and the sun was interacting with the sky very nicely. I wanted to try to mess with the color of the sky and cloud to give it a completely different feeling so I used the Selective Color adjustment. This is different from selecting a specific color using the Color Range tool method or simply using the Hue adjustment. It lets you change a single color one at a time. You can find the under the layer pallet and in the black/white circle icon you will find the "Selective Color" adjustment. Go through each of the color and play around to see which section has been changed. To see a more obvious result move the black on each of the color, if you do not see anything shifting than that color is not used in the photo. The White will allow you to change all the highlights, so it is great if you want to change the glow or highlight colors in the photo. The black will change the shadow, you will notice that changing the blacks will affect most of the photo, so you do not want to change too much of it. The grey will give your photo an overall color tint or tone.

This is after my photoshop tutorial

This is the final version that I have from the video. So here I've made the orange highlights from the original photo even more powerful and I changed the temperature from cool to warm. You could have done most of the editing changing just the gray, but you get a more realistic result if other colors are changed too.

This is another possibility

This is another possibility that can be done, I change the temperature to an even cooler value. So go ahead and experiment with the settings and see what you come up with. Try changing just one color to anther too.