Making colour adjustments to an image in Photoshop is a simple process – we show you how in our Adobe Photoshop courses.
The first part of the process is to make a selection – in this example we have chosen the Elliptical Marquee tool and set the Feather value to 2 or 3 pixels on the top Control panel, which will result in a softer edge to our selection. Generally-speaking, you probably want a soft edge to any selection you make – this will ensure that it blends better with its surroundings.
We then pressed Shift to keep the selection perfectly circular, and Alt (Mac: Option) to draw from the centre outwards. If you later need to resize the selection, go to the Select drop-down menu and choose Transform Selection, which allows you to move, scale or rotate a selection. Again press Shift to keep the resizing circular; otherwise you’ll get an oval shape. And hit Enter to complete the operation.
The pixels we want to colour in this example are not those of the elliptical selection, but the pixels outside of the selection, therefore go to the top Select menu and choose Invert Selection (or Ctrl+Shift+I). Making the selection is actually the hardest part of the process – once you have this you can do anything with the colours or tones or retouching.
In our case we wish to add a colour adjustment. There are several methods for this, but here we chose a simple one. Go to the Create New Adjustment Layer button at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Solid Colour. The Colour Picker will open, allowing us to either punch in values for RGB or CMYK, or simply choose a colour which works with the image from the colour slider and colour field. Hit OK to see the colour applied.
Note the new layer which has appeared above your image layer. To change the colour simply double-click on this adjustment layer for the Colour Picker to open again. This is known as non-destructive editing since the origonal pixel values are not changed. It’s a bit like adding a coloured filter over a camera lens.
Many more tips and techniques can be found at the Adobe website. And see many examples of our clients’ work on our Facebook page.
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