Have you ever wanted to see what your car would look like painted a different color? How about seeing what you would look like with a different hair color? Photoshop CS4 can quickly show you what you car would look like in bright orange, or what you would look like with pink hair, using just a few simple tools that anyone can master. So let’s get started.
Once you have your car photo open in Photoshop CS4, you want to open the Adjustments Panel that is found under Window > Adjustments. For non-destructive photo editing (preserve all the pixels in the original photo), you first want to create an adjustment layer. For this exercise, you want to click on the Hue/Saturation adjustment icon in the top part of the Adjustments Panel. This will create a new Hue/Saturation layer with a layer mask.
When this new layer is selected, you will see the Hue/Saturation Adjustments box with sliders and eye dropper tools. Towards the top of this panel is a drop-down menu that says Master at the top. Using this drop down, select the color of the item you want to change the color of. For instance, if you have a blue car, select Blues. This will this layer to only target that specific color in the photo.
To start changing the color of your car, simply play around with the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders. As you are playing with new colors, you will probably notice some elements in your photo background that are changing colors as well. Now it’s time to use the masking tool to isolate your car from the rest of the background.
Simply select the white mask box on your Hue/Saturation layer, and then change your brush color to black. Select a nice big brush, and start painting the areas of your photo that you don’t want affected by the Hue/Saturation layer. This will create a layer mask that will isolate your car from the rest of the background, keeping everything else in the photo the same color.
That is all there is to it! This quick and easy technique can be applied to any photo to change the color of a specific object.
I mentioned earlier how you can also quickly change something complex in a photo, like hair color. To pull this off, you want to use the lower Hue sliders at the bottom of the Hue/Saturation Adjustments box. Collapse the left and right sliders to a single point, so you are only selecting a very small range of color. Then, use the eye dropper tool to select the hair in your photo. This should capture most all of the individual strands of hair, allowing you to play around with the three color sliders, just like before. If some hair strands were missed using this technique, you can simply expand the range of selected color using the lower Hue slider in the Adjustment box.
For a video overview of everything I’ve talked about here, check out this great video from Creative Sweet TV, from the Adobe TV website.
