The Secret Way to Change Background Colors in Photoshop – Curves

Alright so here we are in Adobe Photoshop let’s get started so photos already loaded up this is the photo that we’re going to be working on today I will show you guys the before and after this is actually the after here’s the before okay this was just a really quick way so you guys will maybe notice that there’s some discoloration going on in the hair right here it’s not a perfect selection by any means but it’s pretty decent definitely something you’d have to fix but spices say I’m gonna show you guys how to do this in literally one simple step so first and foremost

we’re gonna have to do is we’re gonna have to right click on our background and duplicate our background layer so that’s first and foremost there next thing I’ll let me also check something okay let’s go back in here so once you do that the next thing we’re gonna want to do I just did this really quickly with using the magic wand tool but you’re gonna have to select the background using some kind of tool whether it be the magic wand tool or the quick selection tool there’s a multitude of ways to select a certain element of the photo but suffice to say I use the

magic wand tool just because it’s super easy it doesn’t give you the best results but it’s for the tutorials sake it makes makes the most sense so in the beginning if you guys are using this technique just use the magic wand tool and now show you some some more in-depth ways to do selections and Adobe Photoshop to get better results especially with the hair right there there’s better ways to get that but what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna select the background layer and then you’re gonna hit shift to basically add an extra section to the selection because

if you just hit just the one area alone with the magic wand tool it basically just changes the selection and doesn’t allow you to select multiple areas at once so what you’re gonna do is hit to shift and you’re gonna select all the areas that the magic wand tool has overlooked which is gonna be quite a few so making sure that we get in between the legs here and then we get this side a backdrop and then the side of the backdrop alright so now that we have that we’re gonna go up here to the top menu we’re gonna hit select in masks suffice it to say the easiest

way to do this by default it should be on overlay but if it’s not on overlay make sure it’s set to overlay and then set the opacity to 50% to make it easier on ourselves we’re gonna set the radius down here on edge detection to 10 pixels so that basically what its gonna do it’s gonna start detecting the edges of the selection that you have so our model the areas that I’m tracing those all the edges that it will be looking at and then we’re gonna go down into global refinements and we’re going to change the feather to roughly about 1.5 to 3 pixels and and we’ll

mess around with a smooth a little bit as well will maybe set the smooth to like five and then what you’re gonna do is hit okay okay and then that’s going to select our model next thing that we’re gonna do is we’re going to go down here into adjustments and we’re gonna go into curves that’s gonna open up a new curves layer right up here for that background and now we can just tap this and we’re instead of setting it to RGB we’re gonna go down so red green or blue and what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna grab the middle of the the curves and then

you’re going to adjust it up or down until you get the desired color that you want so if you wanted like a really bright pink that’s a little bit over the top we’ll do like things and see what we can get here yeah like maybe something like that let’s see what we can do in the blues yeah like do like light blue and then what you can do is you can play around the curves if you go around here it’s gonna increase the luminosity basically the brightness this is gonna increase the shadows so it’ll affect the shadows over on this side of the photo on the left hand side the photo

will affect the shadows over there so you can have a custom color on that side and then you didn’t have like maybe a greenish color on this side and then like in the highlights you can change it to another color but that’s essentially what you do so I will show you guys the before and after here let’s go back over to our layers panel and we will group these and before after before after see now the main thing like I was saying before it’s not perfect there’s still some purple fringing going on here and then in between right here there are better ways to select

especially when it comes to here there are definitely better ways to actually do selections of here here’s a very complicated thing for Photoshop to actually be able to do edge detection and edge recognition on so there’s other techniques to get a better selection but suffice it to say if we haven’t covered those yet we will cover some of those at a later video but suffice to say what you would do to fix this until we actually put out that specific video you go over here into your layer mask and then you would use being a to get your brush tool and essentially what

you’d be doing is basically painting in these areas right here I have to make it very small but you’d be basically painting in those areas and then just painting out and doing out painting out and then painting here easier said than done though especially when it comes to hair definitely easier said than done but yes that’s essentially what you’d be doing is just painting out those areas definitely easier said than done I would just say wait for the future to tour when we do some edge selection that is a very complicated tutorial so I’m gonna kind of wait on that one for

our show you guys had to do that it’s gonna be kind of an in-depth tutorial on how to do that but yes that that that is how you change colors of backdrops with one tool in Adobe Photoshop I hope this about this video was valuable for you I heard hope this technique add another tool to your quiver so as you’re out there editing photos and you’re battling the fight and have one more tool on how to tackle the situation if you haven’t considered subscribing please consider doing so if you’re new here especially definitely consider subscribing we got some great

concert coming up soon definitely hit us up with a like and a comment in the description down below if you thought I missed anything or you have any specific comments or questions about this video I’d love to answer those in the description down below as always my friends I’m Devon Lenox your host a photography X we’ll catch you in the next video until then peace out