Change your shirt color in 30 seconds with Photoshop

This is how you can change the color of someone's shirt with Photoshop CS2 in 30 seconds. No complex selections are required. You only need to use the Hue/Saturation dialog.

A friend asked me how he could use Photoshop to pick colors for a new paint job for his house, and I believe that this technique might work well for that task.

In this tutorial, I was really quick and lazy, and decided to change the color of both of our shirts, since they both contained similar hues. If you only wanted to change the color of one shirt, that probably be more tedious work involving layers. You still would not have to exactly select a layer boundary that traces each shirt, but you might have to place each shirt on a different layer.

The impressive thing about this technique is:
1. It is very fast and easy to do
2. You achieve results that are still believable
3. You have a lot of power and fine-grain control in selecting hues to modify, and how you want to modify them.

Edit: This technique will not work well for all cases. It works best if what you want to change has distinct hues from other things in the picture. For example, if I wanted to change my shirt color, and it was redish/orange, it might be impossible to use this technique without altering my skin tones. More advanced, time consuming methods use complex selections, masks, and work with levels. This instructable only uses the hue/saturation dialog.

Step 1 Open your picture in Photoshop

Comments

[thearchitect]

I don't think it is that easy in all cases. What if you choose to change the color of a shirt which is originally red or orange? You see, here you are selecting color blue, which is nearly non-existent in human skin, and when you play with hue values it doesn't effect the rest of the photo. But, please go select a reddish item in another photo, play with it like you do in this one, and you'll see how horribly the whole scene changes! :-) So you'll definitely need complex selections to avoid this situation when you have different source colors than blue. Just my two cents. Cheers. K.

[munchman]

Just use the lasso tool to select only the shirt (you can be a bit rough, just come in close when near things of similar colour). or, duplicate the layer, perform this and then erase the bits you want to keep the same. Merge the two.

[rhett]

You're absolutely right that this technique is not so easy for all cases. And the more hues your shirts shares with your skin tone, the worse the effect. It doesn't only work for blue, however. It might work well with someone wearing a green or purple shirt. Try it out on photographs of your own and see what you can get away with. There are many more advanced and complex ways to edit photos that give you more control. That's why people are professional photoshop editors. Many other techniques are much more tedious, complicated, and time consuming.

[thearchitect]

Yes... It takes so much time to master Photoshop. I am sure there are zillions of easier/faster ways to do what takes my fifteen minutes. :-) How to learn all?.. Sigh. Thanks for posting, anyways...

[rhett]

I learned a lot from the DVDs at www.totaltraining.com. The photoshop DVD with Deke McClelland is excellent. It is $300 though, and $250 on ebay. Maybe you could buy it on ebay, watch it, and then re-sell it on ebay to recoup most of your cost. This technique was shown in the dvd. More advanced selection techniques were also shown.

[ac1D]

you can get all these dvd for free, also. not legally, tough. but there is lot of tutorial on the internet, on how to do thing on hpotoshop, so why buy a 300$ dvd?

[amakerguy]

cool I can make a gif animation of a flashing shirt!

[btdesign]

How can you change the blue color of the shirt to BLACK????? Please!!!!!

[MePerson]

set lightness=0 and saturation=0

[binnie]

what about the white in the backround or other colours / parts that get adjusted your better off lassoing the general area then doing what you did then zoom in and go around with the healing brush much more realistic

[xwhite08]

just use quick mask mode to select just the shirt then have fun!

[Phenomenal]

I like your FireFox shirt

[crestind]

This method is fast and works quite well. To change reds and oranges, you could just quickly select the shirt and edit. Colorizing doesn't seem to work well as it makes the color seem very unrealistic and lacking in saturation.

[Crash2108]

You are probably better off selecting the shirt, gray scaling it, and colorizing it.

[AlfonsVH]

Very nice :-)