The Color Replacement Tool In Photoshop

ow To Use The Color Replacement Tool In Photoshop

Selecting The Color Replacement Tool

The Color Replacement Tool is nested behind Photoshop’s regular Brush Tool in the Tools panel. To select it, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) on the Brush Tool, then choose the Color Replacement Tool from the fly-out menu that appears:

The Color Replacement Tool is hiding behind the Brush Tool in the Tools panel.

With the Color Replacement Tool selected, your mouse cursor will change into a circle with a small crosshair in the center of it. As I mentioned, if you’re familiar with the Background Eraser, this will look very familiar to you since both tools use the exact same cursor:

The Color Replacement Tool’s cursor is made up of a simple circle with a crosshair in the middle.

Adjusting The Size Of The Brush

You can adjust the size of the cursor directly from your keyboard, just like you can with Photoshop’s other Brush tools. Press the left bracket key ( [ ) repeatedly to make the cursor smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. To change the hardness of the brush edges, add the Shift key. Press Shift+left bracket ( [ ) repeatedly to make the edges softer or Shift+right bracket ( ] ) to make them harder.

How The Color Replacement Tool Works

As you drag the Color Replacement Tool over your image, Photoshop continuously samples the color that’s directly under the crosshair in the center of the cursor. This is the color that will be replaced, and it will be replaced with your current Foreground color. Any pixels that fall within the larger circle surrounding the crosshair that match the color being replaced will have their color changed.

For example, if you pass the crosshair over an area of blue in your photo and your Foreground color is set to red, any blue pixels that the larger circle passes over will be changed to red. There’s some options we can set in the Options Bar to alter the behavior of the tool (which we’ll look at shortly), but essentially, that’s how it works.

You can see what your Foreground color is currently set to by looking at the Foreground color swatch near the bottom of the Tools panel. By default, it’s set to black:

Black is the default Foreground color, but it’s probably not the color you’ll want to use.

To change the Foreground color, simply click directly on the color swatch, then choose a new color from the Color Picker. I’ll choose a green color, just for fun. Click OK to close out of the Color Picker when you’re done:

Use the Color Picker to choose a new Foreground color.

If we look again in the Tools panel, we see that my Foreground color swatch is now showing the new color I selected. If I paint on an image with the Color Replacement Tool at this point, whichever color I drag the crosshair over will be replaced with green:

The newly chosen color appears in the swatch.

For example, here’s a photo of a young girl holding a balloon:

The girl looks happy, but the balloon looks blue.

She may look happy with her blue balloon, but what she really wanted was a green balloon. As luck would have it, I just happen to have my Foreground color currently set to green, so let’s see what we can do for her.

With the Color Replacement Tool selected, I’ll move the crosshair over the blue balloon in the image and click my mouse button. As soon as I click, two things happen. First, Photoshop samples the blue color under the crosshair so it knows which color to replace. Then, any blue pixels that fall within the larger circle surrounding the crosshair immediately change to green, since green is now my Foreground color:

Photoshop samples the blue color and replaces all blue pixels within the circle with green.

To change the rest of the balloon to green, I just need to keep my mouse button held down and continue dragging the Color Replacement Tool over the remaining blue areas. As long as I keep the crosshair over the blue balloon and don’t stray off into other areas of the image (which would cause Photoshop to sample a different color), only the blue color will be replaced with green:

Keeping the crosshair over the blue area as I paint.

However, If I accidentally move the crosshair outside of the balloon and over the yellow wall behind it, Photoshop samples the color of the wall and begins changing it to green as well. When this happens, simply undo your last brush stroke by pressing Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) on your keyboard, or undo multiple brush strokes by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Z (Win) / Command+Option+Z (Mac) as many times as needed, then continue on:

By moving the crosshair outside of the balloon, Photoshop starts replacing other colors with green.

Tolerance

Everything seems to be going smoothly as I paint over the balloon. That is, until I get to the edges. If you look closely, you can see some faint blue fringing that the Color Replacement Tool is having trouble with:

Some of the original blue color remains along the edges of the balloon.

I mentioned a few moments ago that there are several options available to us in the Options Bar for altering the behavior of the Color Replacement Tool. One of these options is Tolerance. The Tolerance setting tells Photoshop how different a color can be from the sampled color for Photoshop to replace it with the Foreground color. The default value is 30% which is usually a good starting point. Unfortunately, it’s not quite high enough in this case for Photoshop to be able to include the shade of blue right along the edges of the balloon.

I’ll increase my Tolerance value to 50%, which will allow the Color Replacement Tool to affect a wider range of colors:

Increasing the Tolerance setting in the Options Bar.

I’ll undo my last step and try again. This time, thanks to my higher Tolerance setting, the Color Replacement Tool is able to do a better job of removing the blue fringing:

The blue along the edge of the balloon has been successfully changed to green.

I’ll finish painting over the remaining areas as our once-blue balloon is magically transformed into green thanks to the Color Replacement Tool and a little boost in the Tolerance value:

If only it was always this easy to keep kids happy.

Sampling Colors From The Image

In the above example, I randomly chose a new color for the balloon from Photoshop’s Color Picker. But I could just as easily have sampled a color directly from the photo itself. To do that, with the Color Replacement Tool active, press and hold the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key on your keyboard. This temporarily switches you to the Eyedropper Tool (you’ll see your cursor change into an eyedropper). Click on an area of the photo that contains the color you want to use. Photoshop will sample that color and make it your new Foreground color. I’ll click on the pinkish-red top she’s wearing:

Hold down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) and click on an area of the photo to sample a color.

Release the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key when you’re done to switch back to the Color Replacement Tool. If we look at the Foreground color swatch in the Tools panel, we see that the color I clicked on has become my new Foreground color:

The sampled color appears in the Foreground color swatch.

With the color sampled directly from the image, I can paint over the balloon to change its color once again:

The green balloon, originally blue, is now red.

The Blend Modes

Notice that even though we’ve essentially painted over the balloon with a new color, the balloon retained its shiny, reflective appearance. If we had simply grabbed the regular Brush Tool and painted over it, the balloon would look like nothing more than a flat surface with no life to it. So how was the Color Replacement Tool able to keep the balloon’s texture and reflections?

The answer is that the Color Replacement Tool uses blend modes to blend the new color in with the object. There’s four blend modes to choose from—Hue, Saturation, Color, and Luminosity—all of which can be selected from the Mode option in the Options Bar. The default blend mode is Color. It’s the one we’ve been using so far:

The Mode option allows us to change the blend mode for the Color Replacement Tool.

What most of us think of as the color of an object is really a combination of three things—Hue (the actual color itself), Saturation (the intensity of the color) and Brightness (how light or dark it appears). Each of the four blend modes we can choose from for the Color Replacement Tool affects one or more of these properties.

Hue: The Hue blend mode will change only the basic color itself. It will not change the saturation or brightness of the original color. This mode is useful for images where the colors are not very intense and will usually produce very subtle changes.

Saturation: The Saturation blend mode changes only the saturation of the original color. The hue and brightness are not affected. This is useful for reducing the intensity of a color, or even removing color completely.

Color: Color is the default blend mode and will change both the hue and saturation. The brightness will remain unchanged. This is the blend mode you’ll use most often.

Luminosity: Finally, the Luminosity blend mode will simply match the brightness of the original color to the brightness of the new color. Hue and saturation are unaffected.

In this photo below, an orange balloon at the top seems ready to split from the group and fly off on its own adventure into the sky:

The original image.

One way to make the balloon stand out even more from the others might be to reduce the saturation of some of the other balloons below it. I don’t want to change the actual color of the balloons, just the intensity of them. To do that, I’ll change my blend mode option in the Options Bar to Saturation:

Changing the blend mode to Saturation.

If I wanted to completely desaturate the balloons, removing their color entirely, I’d set my Foreground color to either black, white or any shade of gray in between. But since I want a more subtle effect, I’ll just sample one of the less-saturated colors in the image. To do that, I’ll once again press and hold my Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key to temporarily switch to the Eyedropper Tool. Then, I’ll click on a color. I’ll choose a less-saturated yellow. The color itself makes no difference since the Saturation blend mode won’t change any of the original colors. It will only affect the saturation:

Sampling one of the less saturated colors in the image.

With a less-saturated color now set as my Foreground color and my blend mode set to Saturation, I’ll paint over any balloons that need their saturation level reduced, adjusting my brush size with the left and right bracket keys on the keyboard and changing the Tolerance value in the Options Bar as needed. Here, we see the difference in saturation as I paint over one of the other orange balloons. The top part of the balloon (where I’ve painted) shows the reduced saturation. The bottom part (where I haven’t painted yet) still shows the original saturation:

Reducing the color saturation of one of the balloons by painting over it in Saturation mode.

I’ll continue painting over any other balloons that need their saturation reduced. Here’s the finished result:

The orange balloon floating above the others now stands out even more thanks to its higher color saturation.

The Brightness Problem

Unfortunately, there’s one situation where the Color Replacement Tool tends to fail miserably, and that’s when there’s a big difference in brightness between the original color in the image and the color you want to replace it with. Let’s say I wanted to replace the orange in that one balloon we’ve been focusing on with a dark purple color from one of the other balloons. From everything we’ve seen so far, it should be simple enough.

First, I’ll set the colors in the image back to what they were originally by going up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choosing the Revert command. Then, with the Color Replacement Tool selected, I’ll hold down my Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and click on one of the purple balloons to sample its color:

Sampling an area of purple to set as my Foreground color.

I’ll set my blend mode in the Options Bar back to Color, the default setting. Then, I’ll paint over the orange balloon to change its color to dark purple. Here’s the result:

Something’s not quite right.

Hmm. It’s definitely purple, but it doesn’t quite look like the other purple balloons, does it? The problem is that it’s much lighter than the other purple balloons, and that’s because the original color of the balloon was much lighter than the dark purple color I sampled. The Color blend mode had no effect on the brightness. In fact, the only blend mode that does change the brightness is Luminosity, so let’s try that one. I’ll change my blend mode in the Options Bar to Luminosity:

The Luminosity blend mode matches the brightness of the original color to the brightness of the new color.

I’ll undo my steps to return the balloon back to its original orange color. Then, with my blend mode set to Luminosity this time, I’ll try replacing the orange with dark purple: