Practical Photoshop
Jon Adams shows how you can play with colour in your people shots
_ Transform your portraits with digital make-up
Experimenting with different colour treatments is an excellent way to boost your Photoshop skills – and a great place to start is on portrait shots. This image had already been taken with fun, bold colours in mind; but while the model’s clothing and nail polish is working strongly with the background, we could push things a bit further when it comes to her eyes, hair and make-up. There’s a number of ways of approaching colour changes, but I’ll focus here on two methods that will prove useful on any kind of image. The first uses a selection and a Hue/Saturation adjustment, and the second involves painting colours directly onto the picture.
To change the colour of the model’s lipstick, I zoomed in tight on the mouth and clicked around the lips using the Polygonal Lasso tool. When the selection was complete, I removed the area inside the lips by holding down the Alt key and clicking around the inner lip-line. This subtracts from the selection. With a good selection made, I then feathered it by 2px to soften the edge. I created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer, and after ticking Colorize, I tweaked the Hue, Sat and Lightness sliders to mix up a bold, pink colour. With the lips done, I then used exactly the same process to change the eye colour, but mixed up a bright blue to contrast with the yellow background. 1
To add colour to the model’s hair, I created a new layer at the top of the layers stack and changed the Blending Mode to Color. This special mode allows you to paint over an image without losing contrast and detail. To select the colour I clicked on the foreground colour swatch, then sampled a pink colour directly from the model’s clothing. After clicking OK, I selected the Brush tool; with the brush Opacity set to about 40%, I painted pink streaks into the hair.
Using the same layer and brush, I then held Alt and clicked on the yellow background. This loaded the brush with this new colour, and I painted more streaks into the model’s hair to give a yellow and pink blend. 2