Tutorial - how to recolor

Good morning guys! Ready for yet another week? 💪🏼

Some of you asked me to show how to recolor items, so here we go!
Keep in mind that the prosess might be (probably is) different from program to program, but this is how I do it in Photoshop! Maybe you can pick up a trick or two if you use another program?

Step one: select the area you want to recolor, and copy the selected area and paste it on to a new layer. Don't forget to deselect areas you don't want to include in the new clipping, like for example metal parts and logos. 

Step two (method one): open up the color balance panel (or whatever it's called in your program) and play around with the slides on the layer containing the cut out parts of the items.

Step three (method one): you're not happy with the saturation, brightness etc? Open up the hue/saturation panel and turn up/down the saturation. Change the brightness and/or contrast too if you want to. 

Step four (method one): if you want to change the rest of the item, just simply do the same things as mentioned above on the original layer, but again, deselect the areas you don't want to change. Like in this example, I don't want to change the lower part of the girth, logo and buckles. 

And that's it for method one!

Step two (method two): this is the method I prefer, because with this method you'll get exactly the color you want instead of just playing around with the colors like mentioned in method one. Select the things you want to recolor, and open up a new layer in "color" mode.

Step three (method two): in this particular tutorial I want the saddle to be in a mustard yellow color, so I'll find the right color in my color panel and just fill in the selected area.

Step four (method two): but this still doesn't look light the color I have chosen, right? That's because as we know mustard is a bright color, but the layer underneath our color layer is black, which is very dark, so all you have to do is to brighten up the layer underneath your color layer. This is something you almost always have to do when using this method. Either you have to brighten the layer underneath, or darken it, depending on the color you choose. You can also play around with the saturation on the color layer, if you think the color looks too sharp. 

But that looks much better, and I'm happy with the result and done with the recoloring!

From this...

....to this, in a few simple steps!

That's it for this tutorial! I really hope this help for you non Photoshop users as well!

I wish you all a lovely monday!

Hugs from Cath ❤