Tutorial: Recoloring Elements

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't done a tutorial in a while! It's been a little busy around here!

Today I wanted to show you some different ways of recoloring elements rather than just doing an overlay. Some elements are also multi-toned so you don't want to just go to hue-saturation and change the whole thing. You'll get funky colors that way.

I often use a combination of the different select tools in Photoshop. Here's one way.

1. First, you will see I have this cool two-toned button from Miss Tiina. If I de-sat it and then do an overlay, I won't have two colors anymore! So I want to do this differently.

In the above screen shot you can see the color palette I am working with and the button. I want to make the red green and change the tone of the blue a little.

2. I start by going to the Select menu from the top. From there, choose color range. This option works best with primary colors like yellow, red and blue because if you select the yellows and you have a green, it's going to select the yellow out of the green. But you can play around with the options.

3. Here you can see where I asked it to select the reds. You're given a preview of the areas it will select with marching ants.

4. Here you can see those marching ants. It didn't get the inside shadows of the button to well and those have some reds, too. So here, I go to me regular select wand and select the + sign to add some areas to the selection. I decided to select all the white area, too.

5. Here you can see where I have that area selected, leaving the blue circle in the middle.

6. Now go into Image- Adjustments- Hue/Saturation and play around until you get the shade you want.

7. For the blue circle, I couldn't get the screen capture to work but right-click on your selection. A drop-down menu will pop up. Choose "Select Inverse". Now the blue circle is selected, and I went through the same steps Image-Adjustments-Hue/Saturation and played with the settings until I got this:

Voila! With flowers, I have often selected the center and copy-pasted it so it will stay brown or whatever color and not get the overlay. These little changes can help make your elements pop!

Here's an example of a flower that is pretty difficult to recolor but with selective recoloring, it can look a lot more natural!