Change the Colors in Your Photos with Paint Shop Pro (Page 2 of 2)

Step 4: Choose the new color you wish to use. You’ll notice that the color you’ve chosen will be shown on the right in a box called Current.

If you’d like the color to be toned down for a more realistic look, change the saturation to a lower number (the box labelled “S”). I’m going to change the shirt to blue and adjust the saturation number to 110.

When you have the color you want and have set the saturation, click OK.

Step 5: If your photo has other elements within it that contain similar colors to the object you wish to change, you have two options:

1. Change the tolerance settings located in the Tool Options palette. The higher the number is, the more like-colors will be changed. Conversely, the lower you set the tolerance, the more “picky” the Color Changer will be, changing only the colors which closest match the color you select to change.
2. Use the selection tool. If your photo has a lot of similar colors, but you only want one area to change, click on the Freehand Selection Tool and “draw” around the area that you would like to change. For example, in my photo, my niece’s lips are closely matched to the color of her shirt, and so, without making the tolerance level extremely low, her lips will also change to blue.

For now, I’m not going to use the Selection Tool. I’ve set the Tolerance to 50, let’s see what happens...

Step 6: Simply click on the area that you’d like changed. If ever you aren’t happy with the results, pressing Ctrl + Z on your keyboard will undo the changes.

You’ll notice that the majority of her shirt has changed color, but there is still some red remaining on the stripes of her shirt, around the edges and on her fingernails. This is because I don’t have the tolerance control set too high; as mentioned above, if I did, her lips would also change to blue.

So, what do I do now? Taking the Freehand Selection Tool...

... I’m going to draw around the shirt to exclude the face. If necessary, zoom in to get a more accurate selection.

Step 7: Once the area is selected, click on the Color Changer tool and apply as you did in step 6. Even with the lips excluded, when I clicked on the remaining red, the hands also changed to blue. The simple fix is to adjust the tolerance to a lower number (I adjusted it to 30) and play around until you are satisfied with the results.

Additional Tip: Edge Softness, located beside Tolerance in the Tool Options palette, influences the outlining pixels of the area you are recoloring. Corel explains in their help files that “Higher settings cause more ‘bleeding’ of the recoloring”.

Did you find this tutorial helpful? Bright Hub’s Digital Photography channel has several Paint Shop Pro tutorials ideal for beginners and advanced users! You’ll find resources on everything from using layers to reviews of the best free plugins compatible with Paint Shop Pro by visiting our master list of Paint Shop Pro tutorials and resources.