Changing Color In Photoshop With... A B&W Adjustment Layer (Under 1 Min)

On this very quick video, Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE demonstrates a very simple, surprising technique for changing individual colors on an image using Photoshop.

One of the most powerful things about Photoshop is that there are a ton of ways to do almost anything inside the program. For each method you choose there are at least 2-3 other ways of doing very similar things (sometimes much more), some are more complex, some are simple, the way that Smith shows on this video is probably the fastest that we have seen to play with individual colors.

All you need to do is this – add a black and white adjustment layer to your image and change the blend mode to luminosity and now you can play with individual colors.

Remember that you can click on the hand tool and then choose a color on the image and change it which is very useful as well and very intuitive to use.

We played with this technique on a few images and it works very well although you need to make sure you don’t go crazy with the adjustments as you can easily destroy the colors of your image this way.

In the past, we published many videos on doing “selective colors” in Photoshop including

We have looked at selective coloring in the past for example in the video on “Color-Popping with Style in Lightroom” which covered the same topic but on another popular Adobe software.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section. You can find more PhotoshopCAFE videos here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.