The Photoshop® CS Book for Digital Photographers

Adjusting the Color of Individual Objects

This effect is one of the most called upon by art directors working with photographers because of the cardinal rule of working with clients—they were born to change their minds. Now, if the client wishes they had sent a different color shirt for the photo shoot, you don’t reshoot, you just retouch.

Step One.

Open the photo that contains an element that needs to be a different color. Select the area you want to recolor using any selection tool you’d like (Lasso tool, Pen tool, Extract—it doesn’t matter which you use, but you have to have a pretty accurate selection). In this case, I want to change just the color of the fins—not the straps, so I used the Magic Wand tool to select all the blue areas, leaving ...