How to Change a Color Element to Black in Photoshop]

Hey! This is Rick from essential-photoshop-elements.com. In this video, we’re going to see how you can change a colored object such as a shirt to black. I’m going to grab the Zoom Tool from my Toolbox and click on this second blue shirt. It’s the one that we’re going to change to black. So, we’ll zoom up on that, so we can see it a little better. Now, I’m going to grab the Quick Selection Tool from the Toolbox and I’m just going to click and drag over that blue shirt and it pretty much selects the whole thing for me. Now, I’ll go up to the Select menu and choose Refine Edge and I’m going to go with these settings right here. Say OK to that.

Now, in your Layers palette, click on the ‘create new adjustment layer icon’ and then go down and select Hue-Saturation and then your adjustment window. Grab that middle slider which is saturation and drag it all the way over to the left as far as it will go and that would completely desaturate your shirt.

Now, I want to use that selection again. So, if I just go over to my layer mask, I’m going to hold down the command key on the Mac. It would be control key on the PC and watch my cursor changes from finger to the finger with the selection icon on it, and that indicates if I click now, it will make a selection from my layer mask and that’s exactly what I want to do. So, I’m going to click and you can see the marching ants indicating my selection. Now, I’m going to go down to the ‘create a new adjustment layer icon’ and this time, I’m going to choose Levels. In my levels adjustment window, I’m going to grab that middle slider and if I drag it over to the right, you can see my shirt will get darker. So, I’m going to bring it to about 70 and now, the slider over on the left affects how the darkest shadows of my image are affected.

So, if I drag that over to the right, you can see that the shirt gets darker still. So, I’ll bring that to about 50 or so and the slider over on the far right is how my highlights are affected. Well, I don’t have too many real highlights except the buttons. So, the further I drag this, the more it creeps into the mid-tone areas. So, I’m just going to slide this over to 15. That looks pretty good.

Now, let’s go over to our Zoom Tool and double click to go back to 100% view. If I go down to my layers panel and go right on the eyeball from my background layer and if I hold down the option key that would be the alt key on the PC and click, it turns off all layers except for the background layer and that allows us to see what our image looked like before. If I continue holding the option or alt key down and click again, it turns on the new layers, so I can see the before and after by doing that.

And that is a quick and easy way that you can turn a colored item to black in your photos. Thank you for watching this video. I’m Rick and you can find lots more help and information at my website essential-photoshop-elements.com. You can also find me on twitter @ps_elements. Until next time, take care.