Changing Colors Manually in Photos Using the Selection Tool

PSP has some real nifty tools called Photo Enhancement tools. One of these tools is extremely powerful in dealing with color adjustment. What is it? The Manual Color Correction tool, of course. Let's take a look at it.

Look at the image below. To illustrate the point, I will change the color of the Betty White's Dress from a peach to a deep shade of purple First select the dress using the Freehand Selection tool with point to point as the tools options. When you're done, double click when you have returned to the starting point. Marching ants should appear around the area you want to change. Now you want to save the selection to disk. If you did not get all the dress in the selection, simply click the Shift key down and make another selection. To save the selection click Selections>Load/Save Selection>Save Selection to Disk.The reason I would do that is because sometimes inadvertently you click the wrong thing and loose the selection on the dress.

Once the selection(s) is/are made, go to the Main menu and select Adjust>Color Balance> Manual Color Correction. At that point the Manual Color Correction window will open. Then, look in the center, just below the two images. There is a box labeled Color catagory. PSP offers a wide variety of colors to choose from, including vegetable colors, sky colors, woods and even skintones. However, if you're simply trying to match a particular color you want to use the box labeled Custom Color in the lower right hand side of the window. To select a custom color, simply click inside the box and the cursor will transform into a color picker tool. Now you can use the color picker to select a custom shade from the color palette or even from another image to get the exact color match you want.

I chose a purple shade as the replacement color and as you can see, PSP filled the selection with the exact color I chose. One thing that I would like to mention at this point. Look at the two boxes in the lower left hand side of the window under Options group. They are labeled Preserve lightness and Preserve saturation. If the boxes are checked, PSP will retain the same Lightness and Saturation levels of the original color. This will affect the shade of the replacement color you have selected. On the other hand, the color you have selected may me too bright and will require a reduction in saturation or Lightness. To better undersatnd these effects, you should practice this method with several images and change the two Options to see the results.My finished image is shown below: