Change Colour from White in Photoshop Elements

Q: I am new to Photoshop and have just found your site. It is great and put in a simple way that is easy to understand. I had a go at changing the colour of the green t-shirt to blue and it was perfect. I then tried to change the colour of the white cap to blue and it would not work it went blue but when i went to the last step normal> >blend >mode>colour it reverted to white. Wondering what I am doing wrong. It only happens when I am trying to change white to colour. Also some of the colours are not the same as the picked colour say if i choose red to lay on black it comes out maroon colour. Hope you can understand me. Nan


A: I failed to mention in that tutorial that this technique doesn't work for neutral colors like black and white. I recently addressed the problem of changing a color to black with a video. Color to Black Video.

In your case you want to go the other way (from neutral to color). Please ignore my crazy American spelling of the word color :-)

It can still be done pretty easily. Here are the steps for doing that:

1. Make a selection of the white item and give it a slight feather of maybe 1 pixel.

2. Use the Eyedropper Tool to pick-up the color you want to change to.

3. Create a new Color Fill Layer by going to the Layers Palette and clicking on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon (it's the half white/half gray circle) and choosing Solid Color….

4. Change the Blend Mode (located at the top of the Layers Palette) of your new Color Fill Layer from Normal to Multiply.

5. If the Color doesn't quite match, click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon again in the Layers Palette and choose Levels. Use the 3 sliders in the Input area of the Levels dialog box to visually match the color.

I hope that answers your question Nan. Thank you for trying my Tutorials and I'm glad you find my site helpful!

Take care,
Rick