I am excited to bring you the first of our customer tutorials today! A big thank you to Alice Che for sharing this great tutorial with us on Selective Coloring!  Remember…if you have a tip or a trick and make a tutorial that is published on our blog, you will receive $10 to the shoppe as a Thank You! Tutorials need to be made with Weeds and Wildflower goodies!

Now let’s learn from Alice…

Have you ever wanted to use a specific element on a layout but didn’t because the color didn’t match or didn’t look quite right? There are tons of ways to recolor elements, the simplest being the Colorize box in Photoshop. All you have to do is select the color you want the element to be as your foreground color, create a hue/adjustment layer and click the colorize box and play around with the saturation and lightness sliders a little. The only problem is this doesn’t work when you have an element that has more than one color, such as the flowers and leaves vine I’m using as an example. In this case you need to use Selective Recoloring.

This is what happens if you try to use the colorize box (with little adjustments to the sliders) 

Obviously that’s not what you want to do. It would be much better if you could just recolor the flowers. Here’s how you can do that. First click the icon in your layers pallete that allows you to create a new fill/adjustment layer. It is a circle that is half black and half white. Choose Hue/Saturation

When the Hue/Saturation box pops up press Okay.

We want to clip the adjustment layer to the element we want to color first, so it only colors that element and not any others. To do this press Ctrl-Alt-G in PS and Ctrl-G in PSE. Then you want to double click on the Hue/Saturation layer to open the box up again. Once you do this go to the dropdown menu and select any color other than the color of the part of the element you want to change. In this case we want to change the color of the red flowers so I selected Cyan (simply because I’m used to selecting Cyan). If the flowers were Blue I would select Red or a different color. 

After doing this take the dropper tool and click on any part of the flowers. This will cause Reds 2 to show in the drop down menu instead of Cyan, as that is the color I clicked on (the flower). Then if you pull the Hue slider it will change the color of only the flowers. In this case I pulled it to the right to get orange.

You can keep pulling the slider until you get the color you want. Here I pulled it all the way to the right to get a cyan-ish color. 

The color of the flowers was a little too saturated for my taste so I lowered the saturation and got this instead.

There are several other ways of recoloring elements but I found this one the easiest for elements that have colors that contrast relatively sharply, mostly flowers and leaves. 

We hope you enjoy learning this technique and thank you again Alice! I am excited to use your tip soon!

See you all next Tuesday for another tip or trick! If you have any special requests of things you would like to know how to do, please leave us a comment and let us know.  If you have a tutorial to submit, please email me, tcigt@mac.com.

Here is a thread for this tutorial in the forum if we want to chat more about it or ask extra questions too.