Mastering Color Change Techniques for Clothing in Photoshop

Let's see how we can change the color of something. Let's say his shirt. First of all, we need to select the thing that we want to change the color of.

This is a pretty well-defined object, so I think we could use the object selection tool. The only thing is it thinks he is the object, so I need to drag over the area containing the object that I want to select, and then it will look in that area to find my object. Now it still thinks that his arms are part of him, which they are.

They're just not part of the shirt that I want, so I want to deselect his arms. I'm going to hold the option key on the Mac or alt on Windows and then drag over the area that I want to subtract. It will look in that area for something to subtract, and it will subtract it.

Now if you don't want this to be a rectangle, you can switch to a lasso. That might be better for kind of looking in certain areas. Again, I'm going to hold option on the Mac or alt on Windows, and I'm going to lasso around the area where I want it to look in that area to find objects to subtract, and then it subtracts those things.

Now it's not 100% perfect, so we do need to refine this, which if I want to be specific and instead of having it figure out objects and so forth, I could use the lasso. If I hold shift, it will add. If I hold the option or alt key, it will subtract.

I want to subtract these little bits here, so I'm going to lasso around these. Now here I have to draw very carefully because exactly the area that I draw around, it will subtract that exact area, so meaning that it doesn't look in that area for things to subtract. It literally subtracts or adds that area depending on what you're doing.

Shift will do the add, so let's say I hold shift. I could go back and add this, and you have to loop around the whole entire area to say I want to add that whole area, but the edge that you draw, it depends on how well you draw that, so you have to be accurate and good to do that. So I want to see how good of an area this is, like what's the edge quality like, so I'm going to go into select and mask to see, so I get a better preview here, and I can zoom in a little closer.

I can preview this using the current overlay. I could preview it on a black background, which would show me if there are light halos. I could preview this on a white background, which would show me dark things like, oh yeah, see there's little things here.

See, so this is where you can see subtle things that you would never have necessarily noticed on black because it's so dark. This is where switching to different backgrounds can help you. I want to paint away some of this stuff, so I'll use my paintbrush here.

Go in with a bigger brush. I'm going to set it to subtract these parts, and I could paint this away like so, so I will get rid of that. Now my edges are looking pretty jagged here.

They're not looking very smooth, so I think I'm going to go in and apply a little bit of smoothness. That definitely helps. Now as far as how good does this have to look, let's say I go to overlay to see this.

This is if we had a red shirt on him. I do think we need to smooth this a little bit more and maybe give a little bit of softness to it, a little bit of feather, because what I don't want is I don't want there to be a super distinct line here. There is a bit of softness in this to begin with, and so if it's too hard, it looks kind of too crisp, which doesn't look good.

Now we don't want to go too feathered, too soft. We want something that kind of matches the edge, so maybe just a little bit there. Keep in mind that these are general controls over everything, so there might be areas where you need to go in and custom kind of paint stuff.

Oh look, here's some blue jeans. We don't want the blue jeans to be changed, so let me go in and remove those. I'll make sure I'm in removal mode here, and I'm going to go paint away those.

I don't want to change the color of his blue jeans, just his shirt. Okay, and yeah, so it was here. Here I felt like that should be a little bit smoother.

Now, oops, let me undo. In this case, I want to add, so I go back to add, and then we could paint in some and get this to be a little bit smoother there. Okay, so we'd go through, make sure everything is good, look around all the edges, and then if we like that, we're going to just keep this as a selection.

I don't want to do a mask because I don't want to hide everything but the shirt. I want to change the shirt, so we select what we want to change and then we go about changing it. All right, so now I can create a new layer to change the color.

Now, there's a couple ways you could do this. One way would be to do a hue saturation layer. If you do hue saturation, when you change this, you are kind of rotating the current selected hues.

Now, if there are multiple hues, they're all going to rotate. It won't apply just one single color unless you check on colorize. If you check on colorize, if there are multiple colors, then it will just apply that single color to everything.

So the only problem with this is you're just kind of going through all the colors. So if you want a specific color to dial it in, this is not so good. Now, if you don't know what you want, if you want to experiment, this can be quite nice.

You can play with the saturation, you can lighten or darken it, you can choose the color. So this can be quite nice. But what if you want a specific color, like a specific green and you know that particular shade of green, then maybe this isn't the best approach.

So let me undo and go back. Before I created this layer, I just had my selection. Instead, when I want to fill this with a color, I can go in and create a new solid color fill layer and I can dial in the specific color that I want.

Now, don't worry that it looks ugly. I know that it does not look good. We're going to need to blend this into the underlying layer.

But first, we've got to choose the color. So let's say there's a very specific color green that you have chosen before, or let's say it's a client color and they've said, make this shirt this color. So that's the color that I want.

And I hit OK. So this is my shirt color. What is not good is this is one color, but it's also one luminosity.

Luminosity is a term for illumination or lightness. The color underneath that is, it's one color, but it's many luminosities. It's lights, it's darks.

So it's a variable luminosity. This is a single luminosity. So I like the underlying luminosity, but I like the color of this layer.

So the blending that I want, when you think about blend modes, blend modes are going to blend one aspect that you like, such as the hue or color. And it uses the underlying layers for the other parts. So if I'm just blending the color from this layer, I get the luminosity from the underlying layer.

That's really interesting because all I want is the color of this. I don't need its single luminosity. So what's the difference between color and hue? At first glance, it might seem very similar other than kind of the brightness to it.

But let's take a closer look. If I look at hue here and I look at the buttons, the original buttons did not really have a color. And when I do hue versus color, notice how color, it is actually applying this green, even to the buttons, which didn't have a color to begin with.

So color is more like that colorize, where it's applying color, even where there was none. Hue is a bit more respectful. Hue says, if there was a hue, if there was a color beforehand, I'll replace it.

But if there wasn't, I'm not going to force myself onto things. So it's not going to apply the color as pronounced as color does. So I think in this case, hue is a little bit nicer because it does not colorize my buttons.

And I want to keep those kind of as they were. Now, I do see actually a little mistake here, which I did not catch previously. I'm colorizing some of his skin, but that's OK.

I've got a mask. I can go in with my paintbrush. I want to hide the color.

So I'm going to be painting with black. So my foreground color is black and I go in and I can paint away that color. If I click and then I shift click and I shift click, that's doing a straight line between those clicks like so.

And actually, we might want just a teeny little bit of it because it looks like there was a little bit of red from the the light that was reflecting off of his shirt onto his skin. So I might want just a little bit of that. So what I could do is I can go in with a soft brush and maybe just a very low opacity.

So I'm just painting with a little teeny bit, going with a little bit bigger here. And that way, each paint mark that I make, it just puts in a little bit. In fact, that's way too small.

Let's go a little bit more and I can build up just a little bit of that green. Oops. Actually, I'm painting with black, which means I'm hiding.

I'm doing the opposite of what I wanted to do. So I really want to go paint with white. So let me paint this back in.

I started seeing the red appear again here. So I want to paint with white to make the green appear. So I'm going to paint with just a little bit of this.

Like so just a little bit, I can layer it up. I'd rather have this. I'd rather have this opacity too low and have to hit it multiple times because if that opacity is too high and it's too much, you just have to undo the whole thing.

If you have it very nice and low, you can always go over it once. If that's not enough, go over it twice and so on until you build it up. So keep that in mind that sometimes something in your environment will cast a light like reflective light or something onto something else so that even though his skin isn't the shirt color, it kind of is because of the reflection of the shirt color on him.

So that is very accurate in terms of the luminosity of his original shirt, but just with the color of this. But what if you want this color to be a lighter green? So I've chosen the right color, but I just want to change its brightness. If I double click on this fill layer to change its color, I can go to B for brightness and I can make this brighter.

But keep in mind that the way that this blend mode works is it says to use the hue only. Only use the color. Don't use the luminosity or brightness of that layer.

No, use the brightness or luminosity of the underlying layer. So this isn't going to work because all this layer does is provide the color. It does not provide the brightness or luminosity.

For that, I would need another layer. So I'm going to show you something that's not in the exercise, but I like to show it just as a little extra thing here of changing the brightness here. So let's say I do a curves adjustment so I can do that curves adjustment here to brighten.

Now I'm just going to look at the shirt when I'm doing this, but this is changing everything in the image and I don't want it to change everything in the image. Now this had a layer mask and essentially I kind of want the curves to have the same layer mask because I want it to be confined to the shirt. But if I let's say copy the layer mask, if I ever want to update the one, I'd have to update the other.

I don't really want two layer masks that I have to update both. So what we can do instead is we can select both layers, click on one, hold shift and click on the other, and I can group them. So I can say layer group layers and I'll call this my shirt changes and I'm going to move the mask to the group by moving the mask to the group.

And I can actually drag the other mask to the to the trash. This is the lightness, right? Whatever I put into the group, the lightness, the shirt color, all of those things are shown in this area. So the mask can be put onto the group and it will mask everything in that group.

Nice. Now one thing to be careful of is the order in which you do your layers. I did the lightness later, but it will look slightly different if I reorder these layers.

Let me show you the difference. See there is a little bit of a difference. Look at the brightness here.

It is subtle in this case, but there is a little bit of a difference. What is that difference here? Let me explain. Let's say I don't just do this as lightness.

I do this as like brightness and contrast. So I'm going to call this brightness and contrast. Okay.

So let's say I crank up the contrast and I'm going to make this contrasty here. So let's say I brighten that and all right. And maybe the brightest, notice how I'm trying to lighten this, but it's not having a very pronounced effect.

That's because I'm not actually changing the brightest bright. Let me actually drag these off here. Look at how this image kind of flat lines here, meaning there's no pixels in this part of the tonal range.

So I'm kind of wasting my brightest white on pixels that don't exist. If I pull this over now, notice how I'm getting some brighter, bright areas. In fact, I could keep going and getting even brighter, bright areas.

Now I'm able to get a brighter bright because I'm changing that the brightest white is over here in pixels that I have in my image. All right. So I'm going to have my highlights be pretty bright and my shadows be darker.

And this is cranking up the contrast. Now it's cranking up the contrast after the green. And what happens is even though I'm thinking I'm just changing the composite, the red, green, and blue composite, which is I'm just changing luminosity.

I'm not changing the color. I'm not going into an individual channel and changing color. For the longest time, I thought, well, if I just change brightness, that's all I'm affecting.

I'm not changing the color. But that's wrong. Actually, when you change brightness and contrast, you are affecting color as well.

For example, if I lower the contrast, do you notice how dull this looks? It's like I have less color saturation. And the more I increase contrast, notice it looks like I have more color saturation. So contrast is directly connected to color saturation.

So if this layer, if its purpose is only to change the contrast and to change the brightness, and I don't want the unwanted side effect of it also changing the vibrance or saturation of that layer, I can use a blending mode to solve that. This is an advanced technique, but it's really cool because I never thought for the longest time about using a blend mode on an adjustment layer, but it's one of the ways that I use them the most. I can say that this layer should only change the luminosity of the underlying layer, meaning don't change the color.

So remember, if you separate color from luminosity, luminosity being illumination or lightness, if you separate color changes from luminosity changes, this layer can only change its luminosity. See, back in the normal mode, look, it changed the color. In luminosity, it doesn't change the color.

Notice how it is now only changing the brightness of this exact color. For the longest time, I didn't realize that these two things were connected. That contrast affects saturation.

So if I put this layer into a luminosity blend mode, it changes how light or dark it is. If I change this layer to hue, it only controls the color. So I've now targeted each layer to do only what I want it to do.

This controls the color. This controls the brightness without accidentally changing the saturation, because what you don't want to do is choose a color only to then saturate it, which shifts the color. So if you use the luminosity blend mode on this layer, all this layer can do is just change how bright the color is, but it won't actually shift that color and make it more saturated.

Now keep in mind that then you can't do a color balance here. Like if I go into red, it's not going to make it more or less red. It's only changing how light or dark it is.

So you do have targeted layers, one for color and one for brightness and contrast, or what we generally call luminosity. So that's kind of a pro technique here that you can make a change, throw on a layer without shifting the color saturation, and this is how you can end up changing the color of something and the brightness that goes along with it. So you can try this out in exercise 5a.