How to change the colour of a specific object in an image

I'm sure that today's lesson will be a very interesting one. And add to that it's quite easy too. Changing the color of a specific object in an image is one of the really cool Photoshop effects you'll ever find. It's highly useful in many occasions such as photo editing and recoloring. Whenever we get the need to re colour images/photos, it's a bit difficult. But with this effect, it's always a job well done with high quality plus even the beginners can do it. Focusing on, there are different ways to change the color but what you are going to learn is changing color of objects using hue/saturation method.

Step 1

First open the image you want. As you can see here, I have an image of a truck. I’m going to change the color of the truck, flag and the shirt of the truck driver.

Step 2

First I’m going to colour the truck. For that you need to make a selection because, colours that very similar to the colour of the truck in the image may also change accordingly. Using the Polygon Lasso Tool, roughly select the truck.

As we don’t want to change the colour inside the truck, roughly remove the selection from the inside of the truck. To do this from the Options Bar, click on the “Subtract from selection” and roughly select the inside of the truck.

Note: the selection doesn’t have to be point to point as we are not shifting or changing the background so a rough selection around the object would suffice.

Step 3

Next is to open an adjustment layer. At the bottom of the the Layers Palette, click on the “Create new fill or adjustment layer” and go to “Hue/Saturation” from the list.

You’ll get a new window opened.

Note: You can go to “Image” on the Menu bar and then go to “Adjustments” and select “Hue/Saturation” and change colour but this is a onetime thing. Once you change the colour and if you need to change the colour again, you’ll have to start all over again. Using Adjustment Layer is easy.

Step 4

On this new window, you’ll see a cage named “Master”. Change this to a colour limit that is similar to the colour you selected on the image. In my case, my truck is Orange colour so I selected the colour limit to “Reds”.

Step 5

If you look further below in the window, you’ll see three pipettes. Out of these three, click on the pipette with + mark (Add to Sample pipette) and on your selection click on several spots where you think there a slight difference in colour. In my truck, you’ll see the distribution of orange colour is not the same in the front and the back and on sides due to lighting and shadow effects. This “Add to sample” pipette helps us to select all the spots with slight differences of the same color.

Step 6

Now, using the Hue, Saturation and lightness drag marks, you can change the colour of your selection. 

Step 7

In the same way, using Polygon Lasso Tool, roughly select the flag.

Now in the same way click on the “Create new fill or adjustment layer” and go to “Hue/Saturation” to change color as you did earlier.

Step 8

To change the color of the shirt of the driver, make a rough selection around the shirt using Polygon Lasso Tool.

Open a new adjustment window from “Hue/Saturation” in “Create new fill or adjustment layer” from layer palette. Now you should select "Blues" from the Master.

Once you are done changing the colours and if you want to re change them, simply double click on the adjustment layers on the layer palette to change.

Final Image

Hope you enjoyed the lesson. 

Download PSD file

Watch the video of this lesson

Sharing is Caring :)

Respected Readers: We highly appreciate your kind donation for our website which will be contributed for the enhancement and development of it with the hope of educating more and more.