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H/S: Selective Color Change

About the Tutorial:

This tutorial aims at showing you how you can selectively tone down vibrant or bright colors. While there are other ways to achieve this particular effect, this tutorial shows you how much you can do with a few Hue/Saturation layers alone.

We'll be converting the first image to the second:

Step by Step:

Open the image you want to change in Photoshop.

In the image I selected, one of the first things I want to change is that distracting bright blue background.

Go to Layer --> New Adjustment Layer --> Hue/Saturation.

A dialogue box pops up like below. Since my aim is to change specifically the blue color, I've selected Blues under the Edit: drop down menu.

On a side note, the Edit: drop down menu has several options:
   

Choose which ever color on the list that you wish to change. Sometimes you may have to change more than one color on the menu to change the same color on the image.

The default selection is Master. Changing the colors here would change the overall colors of the image. It does not give you control over specific colors.

By selecting Blues, I target only the blue hues on the image, leaving the other colors alone.



As you can see, you have three options to change: Hue, Saturation and Lightness.

1. Hue: Changing this will change the color of any blue hue (in this case) on the image. If I move the slider to the left, I encounter light blues, cyans, greens and finally yellow at the extreme left (-180). If I move it to the right, I'd come across purples, reds, oranges and finally yellow at the extreme right (+180).
2. Saturation: If you increase or decrease this you add or take away color from the shade respectively. -100 gives you a monochrome gray where as +100 gives you excessively bright colors.
3. Lightness: Increasing this will make the color lighter, decreasing it will add shadows and depth. -100 on the scale gives you black, +100 gives you white.

* Note: 0 is default for all three and represents the original color state.

With the settings above I managed to change the some of the blue to a darker duller purple. [See second image below.]

In the second image, you'll notice that there is an unchanged brighter blue. To merge it with the background color I have now, I selected and editted Cyans on the drop down menu of that same Hue/Saturation Layer. [See third image, Hue: +121, Saturation: -34, Lightness: -80]

Once you're satisfied with the result, click on OK to put the layer into effect.


*Note: H/S above implies Hue/Saturation.

Notice the change in the background, that required tweaking two different colors (Blues, Cyans) on the H/S layer and also - note that the color of the microphone and jeans have also been changed.

* Although it may seem obvious: Remember that changing a certain color changes those places on the image where that color appears.

Now that we have a non-distracting background, the other color that I want to tone down or get rid of - is that yellow light that's reflecting on him.

Again, Layer --> New Adjustment Layer --> Hue/Saturation.

This time, my obvious selection on the Edit: drop down menu is Yellows.



Here, I chose to use Lightness to bleach out the yellow light to a more lighter light.

If you noticed, I've encircled the color-gradient palette at the bottom of the Hue/Saturation dialog box. Basically, this gives you a visual representation of the color that you are working with.

For example, suppose you chose Magentas instead of Yellows, then the indicator would lie over the magenta colors, like this:


Any changes you make to that color would be visible on the lower horizontal palette. The color spectrum above stays the same.

Since I've used Lightness to fade out the yellow, you can see that change in the first image below. Beside it are two other changes I could've done:


You can also slide this indicator across between the two to get interesting results.

With the changes I made earlier, this is how my image looks now:


*Note: H/S above implies Hue/Saturation.

I wasn't too fond of his pink shirt, so using the same technique, I changed and darkened the shirt by altering the Magentas and Reds so that the shirt is no longer pink:


Notice that with the shirt, the dull purple background has changed to a brown.

Having done that, I'm now pleased with the depth of colors I've achieved. Here is the final result:


Some of the changes I've made and demonstrated were subtle but precise. You can use the same technique to add more color or vibrancy to your image, the opposite of what I've done here.

Hopefully, you will find this tutorial useful in the future. Have fun experimenting!