Two Ways Of Matching Clothes To Any Color Background In Photoshop

In this short video tutorial posted by Aaron Nace from Phlearn we look at how you colorize your subject clothing using Photoshop which can of course also help in many other situations where you need to change the specific color of an object in an image.

Hue/saturation adjustment layer

There are several ways of adjusting the color of clothing (or anything else for that matter) to another color in your image. One of those ways is using the hue/saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop.

To do that go to layer>new adjustment layer>hue/saturation (you can also do the same with the mouse on the layers tab in the right bar and choose the hue/saturation from the dropdown menu on the adjustment layer icon which looks like a half white half dark circle).

Now choose the dropdown menu which has “master” and choose the color that you are working with in your image (the one that you are trying to change), in the image sample on the video Nace is using blues, and then click on the eyedropper and choose the color you want to change.

Now you can change the hue to change the color you picked. If colors in other places change as well and you don’t want to you can easily restrict the area that you change by applying a mask and invert it (ctrl/cmd I) and using a white brush paint on the areas that you want to new color to be applied.

Color range

Another method for changing color where you have a specific color that you want to change that exists only in the area that you wish to change (say the yellow socks on a model like in the video), you can create a new layer and go to select>color range.

Click on the eyedropper and choose the area with the color that you want to change. This will create a selection of similar colors in the image. It might include some other areas that are similar in color but as long as the area that you wanted is selected fully that should not be an issue.

Now choose the brush tool and sample the color that you want from the image (or just choose a color that you want for the brush) and paint over the selected area that you want to change.

The result might not look very realistic but what you can do is deselect the selection (ctrl/cmd D) and change the blend mode of the layer to color. If you colored areas that you didn’t want to just choose a dark brush and on the layer mask go over it and it will be removed.

More on changing colors in Photoshop

This isn’t the first video showing us how to match colors in a photo in Photoshop, you can also check “How to Match colors in a Composite Image in Photoshop” with Colin Smith as well as a similar video by Glyn Dewis.

You can find even more videos on changing colors in Photoshop in “How to Change the Color of Anything in Photoshop”, “3 Ways of Changing Makeup Color In Photoshop CC” as well as “Changing Color in Photoshop with… a B&W Adjustment Layer (Under 1 min)” by Smith and if you are interested in working with colors in general check out this page on LensVid.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (you can also find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

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.