In Chapter 4, you saw one way to change the color of an object: Select it and then use Quick Fix’s Hue and Saturation sliders. Elements also gives you other ways to achieve the same result: You can use an Adjustment layer, the Replace Color command, or the Color Replacement tool. (The Smart Brush tools offer a whole menu of color changes, too; see the Tip below for the lowdown.)
The method you should choose depends on your photo and personal preference. Using an Adjustment layer gives you the most flexibility if you want to make changes later. Replace Color is the fastest way to change one color that’s widely scattered throughout your whole image. And the Color Replacement tool lets you quickly brush a replacement color over the color you want to change. Figure 9-18 shows the kind of complex color change you can make in a jiffy using any one of these methods.
Tip
The Smart Brush, which you learned about back on Correcting color with a brush, also lets you target the area you want to change and make a quick color adjustment, so you might think that sounds like a good tool for changing color. It can be, but its color presets are pretty limited (and pretty ugly). Also, the Smart Brush doesn’t just apply a single color—it uses gradient maps (Saving Gradients) instead. If you can get the effect you like using the Smart Brush, go for it. But it’s tough to adjust color with this tool, since you have to either pick a different gradient or edit the gradient the Smart Brush used (Editing Gradients tells you how). On the whole, the methods described in the following pages are much simpler to control.
Figure 9-18. What if you have a green-and-white vase but you really want a red-and-white one? Just call up the Replace Color tool! Elements gives you several ways to make complicated color substitutions like this, all of which are covered in this section.
You can use a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer to make the kind of color changes you saw in Figure 9-18. The advantage of this method is that you can go back later and change the settings you used or change the area affected by the layer (as opposed to changing your whole image). The process is the same as the one described on Making Colors More Vibrant, only this time you start by selecting what you want to change:
Select the object whose color you want to change.
Use any of the Selection tools (see Chapter 5). If you don’t make a selection before creating the Adjustment layer, you’ll change your whole photo.
Create a new Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer.
Go to Layer→New Adjustment Layer→Hue/Saturation. The new layer affects only the area you selected.
Use the Adjustments panel’s sliders to tweak the color until it looks good, and then click OK.
Use the Hue slider first to pick the color you want. When it’s close to the right color, use the Saturation slider to adjust the color’s vividness and the Lightness slider to adjust its darkness.
This method is fine if it’s easy to select the area you want to change. But what if you have a bunch of widely scattered areas of color to change, or you want to change one shade everywhere it appears in your photo? For that, Elements offers the Replace Color command, explained next.
Take a look at the green-and-white vase in Figure 9-18 again. Do you have to tediously select each green area if you want to make it a red-and-white vase? You can do it that way, but it’s far easier to use the Replace Color command. When you use this command, you’ll see one of those Elements dialog boxes that looks a bit intimidating, but it’s a snap to use once you understand how it works. Replace Color changes every instance of the color you select, no matter where it appears in your image.
You don’t need to start by making a selection when you use this command but as usual, if you want to keep your options for future changes open, use it on a duplicate layer (Ctrl+J/⌘-J). And before you start, be sure your active layer isn’t an Adjustment layer, or Replace Color won’t work. Then:
Open the Replace Color dialog box.
Go to Enhance→Adjust Color→Replace Color. The Replace Color dialog box in Figure 9-19 appears. You may need to drag it out of the way so you can see your whole photo.
Move your cursor over your photo.
The cursor changes to an eyedropper. Make sure that the left eyedropper in the Replace Color dialog box (the one without a plus or minus sign by it) is the active one, as in Figure 9-19.
Click an area of the color you want to replace.
Elements selects all the areas that match the particular shade you selected, but you won’t see the marching ants in your image the way you do with the Selection tools. If you click more than once, you change your selection instead of adding to it, the way you would with any of the regular Selection tools. To add to your selection (that is, to select additional shades), Shift-click in your photo.
Another way to add more shades is to select the middle eyedropper (the one with the + sign next to it) and click in your photo again. To remove a color, select the right eyedropper (with the – sign) and click, or Alt-click/Option-click with the leftmost eyedropper. If you want to start selecting all over again, Alt-click/Option-click the Cancel button to turn it into a Reset button.
Figure 9-19. The area of the Replace Color dialog box that looks like a negative shows you where the sliders will affect the color. The lighter areas are where Elements plans to substitute your new color. Use the Hue and Saturation sliders to adjust the replacement color (shown in the Result box) the way you would with a regular Hue/Saturation adjustment. The Fuzziness setting (explained in Figure 9-20) works a little like the Magic Wand’s Tolerance setting and the Localized Color Clusters checkbox is something like the Magic Wand’s Contiguous setting—it restricts the selection to colors near where you click.
When you’ve selected everything you want to change, move the sliders to change the color.
The Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders work exactly the way they do in the Hue/Saturation dialog box (Making Colors More Vibrant). Move them and watch the Result box in the Replace Color dialog box to see what color you’re concocting. You can also click the Result box to bring up the Color Picker and choose a shade there. If you need to tweak the area you’re changing, use the Fuzziness slider to adjust the range of colors that Color Replacement affects, as shown in Figure 9-20.
Look at your photo after you’ve chosen your replacement color. If the preview doesn’t show that color in all the areas you want, click the missing spots with the dialog box’s middle eyedropper to fix them.
Click OK.
Figure 9-20. Fuzziness is similar to the Magic Wand’s Tolerance setting (page 164). Take a close look at the red parts of this vase—there’s still a lot of green in the center of some of them. To change more pixels, set the Fuzziness higher by moving the slider to the right (in this image, that change would make all the green spots turn red). If you find you’re changing areas you don’t want to, move the Fuzziness slider to the left instead.
You can also brush on a color change. The Color Replacement tool lets you brush a different color onto the area you want to change without changing any colors besides the one you target.
You can use pretty much any color you want with this tool, so you’d think it would be pretty versatile for changing colors, but these days there are more useful tools in Elements. That’s partly because the Color Replacement tool doesn’t do everything it used to do in early versions of the program. Now it works best when you simply want to change a color to another hue of similar intensity; you’re likely to get poor results if you want to replace a light color with a darker one, for example. Figure 9-21 shows the virtues and limitations of this tool.
Figure 9-21. If you’d like to put some zip into this photo by coloring the hat, the Color Replacement tool is one way to do it. Although the sampled color used was a dark teal green, the Color Replacement tool in Hue mode brushes on a pale, vivid aqua instead. If you wanted to make the hat the intense dark teal of the sampled color, you should use a different method instead, like adding a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer (page 336).
Using the Color Replacement tool is straightforward:
Pick the color to use as a replacement.
Elements uses the current Foreground color as the replacement color. To change colors, click the Foreground color square in the Tools panel and then choose a new hue from the Color Picker.
Activate the Color Replacement tool and pick a brush size.
Click the Brush tool in the Tools panel or press B and then choose the Color Replacement tool from the pop-out menu. For this tool, you usually want a fairly large brush, as shown in Figure 9-21. (See Chapter 12 to learn all about brushes.)
Click or drag in your photo to change the color.
Elements targets the color that’s under the crosshairs in the center of the brush cursor. So in Figure 9-21, for example, keeping the crosshairs inside the hat ensures that only the hat changes.
Tip
You may want to use the Color Replacement tool on a duplicate layer (Ctrl+J/⌘-J) so you can adjust the layer’s opacity to control the effect.
The Options bar settings make a big difference in the way this tool works:
Brush options. These settings (size, hardness, angle, and so on) are the same as for any brush. See Chapter 12 for more about brushes.
Mode. This controls the tool’s blend mode (Blend Mode). Generally you’ll want to choose Color or Hue, although you can get some funky special effects with Saturation.
Limits. This setting tells Elements which areas of your photo to look at when it searches for color. Contiguous means it only targets areas that touch each other. Discontiguous means the tool changes all the places it finds a color—regardless of whether they’re touching.
Tolerance. This is like the Magic Wand’s Tolerance setting: The higher the number, the more shades of color Elements changes. This setting is the key to getting good results with this tool.
Anti-alias. This setting smoothes the edges of the replacement color; it’s best to leave it turned on.