Have you ever seen a really cute element in a kit, but the color wasn’t working well in your layout? Or maybe the kit didn’t come with background paper in the right color? Depending upon the original color of the object and the color you’re looking for, you may be able to recolor the element or background paper to get just the right color. And it can be very easy.
I know I had all sorts of qualifiers in the last paragraph. The truth is that some colors can be more difficult to recolor than others. And it’s definitely easier to recolor something that starts out being one color – or that you want to end up being one color. Today I’m going to show you how to do some simple recoloring using hue/saturation.
The paper and orange piece of tape are from Penny’s “Boys’ Club” collab with Kristin Cronin-Barrow. I recolored the blue and green pieces of tape from copies of the orange tape. Here’s how I did it…
First, make a copy of the orange tape by (1) right-clicking on the tape in the layers pallette and selecting “duplicate layer” or (2) dragging the tape to the “new layer” icon - the one that looks like a piece of paper at the bottom of the layers pallette next to the trash can. Now move the new piece of tape so you can see both. Now you have a choice to make – do you want to do this in a destructive or non-destructive manner? Put another way, do you want to recolor the tape without really changing it? Given a choice, I will almost always choose the non-destructive way to do things, but be aware that you can also make the changes directly to the element if you wish.
Next, I’m going to recolor the tape by changing its hue and saturation - and I’m going to do it using a shortcut called “colorize”. Set the foreground color to the color to which you want to change the element. Do this by clicking on the “set foreground color” button, which will open up the color picker, then clicking on the color you want to match. It helps to zoom to “actual pixels” in order to accurately pick the correct color. With the color picker open, you’ll have an eyedropper on the layout. Move the eyedropper to the color you want and click. The new color will show up in the color picker and if you’re satisfied, click “ok” to make that the new foreground color.
To recolor the tape, I’m going to add a hue/saturation adjustment layer by selecting “Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation”. In the dialog box make sure to select “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” and click OK.
You’ll now have an adjustment layer and the Adjustment Panel will be open. Select “colorize” and your element will recolor according to the foreground color you chose. If you’re not quite happy with the color, you can tweak it by moving the sliders (hue, saturation, and lightness) to change the effect. I’m perfectly happy with the result, so I’m not going to change anything. If you don’t want to use colorize, you can skip changing the foreground color and simply recolor the object using the sliders - it’s totally a matter of preference.
I don’t know how well you can see it, but the new green tape isn’t quite as bright as the one in my first photo. I wanted a brighter green that would go better with the orange, so I duplicated the recolored tape (just the tape, not the adjustment layer), moved it on top of the adjustment layer, and changed the blending mode to “Luminosity” to make the color pop more.
Can you see the difference? Finally, I repeated the same steps to make a blue version of the tape – from start to finish the entire process took less than 1 minute!
Having tried a fair amount of recoloring, I’ve learned a few things. It’s important to recolor a dark object with a similarly dark color or a light object with a light color. Don’t try recoloring a dark brown ribbon to a pale pink, but it may work well as a deep purple. It’s easiest to recolor an object that’s already close to the color you want; so if you want an orange piece of ric-rac and the kit you’re using doesn’t have any ric-rac, see if you have a piece of dark yellow or red ric-rac in your stash and start with that rather than starting with a color that’s very different. For some reason it’s easier sometimes to work with a grayscale image, so occasionally I’ll take the object and turn it grayscale before I try to recolor it. My other piece of advice is to keep practicing – it gets easier once you get the hang of it.
What do you think – do you think you’ll try recoloring an element or paper?
Thanks for stopping by… and happy scrapping!
