Hey guys, Gerry Button here for Iceberg Creativity. I want to apologize to all of you for the lack of updates to this channel. I’ve been very busy in real life lately and haven’t had the chance to finish many of my tutorials. But a close friend in real life asked me if there’s an easy way to replace the background color of an image within Photoshop. And I told him there are many different ways, but he had asked me about the replace color tool.

Now, I have used this tool quite a bit but I know not many people do. And to be honest, not many people actually know it exists. So what this tool does is exactly what its name is. It can replace the background color or any and all color you choose in an image in a few easy steps.

So what I’m going to show you today is how to remove or just adjust the blue background under this image from this color to this color. It’s pretty basic, it’s really quick, and I hope you’ll learn something from it. The purpose of this tutorial is not to show you how to make the outcome of this image. It’s just to show off this tool. Are you guys ready? Let’s get started.

Begin by opening up Photoshop and opening up the image you want to use. I have here on my desktop, it’s called a Guitar Girl. It’s a basic stack and it has a really simple background and it’s perfect for the tutorial to show you the effect. So I’m just going to drag it to Photoshop’s icon on the dock and it will pop open. I’m going to double click my magnifying glass over here on the tools palette to bring out the actual size. Now, the image is a bit too big and it’s a bit—well, it has a great sharpness feature to it, but I want to make it a bit sharper.

So first, I’m going to go to filter and choose sharpen, then sharpen. And everything will look a bit sharper. Now, I’m going to resize it by going to image and choosing ‘image resize’ or ‘image size’, whatever. And then, I’m going to make the height 735 and then hit OK. My image is now sized down to what I want and once again, I’m going to just hit sharpen. You can hit Command-F or you can go right here and click it, and it’s sharp to the point that I want it but it’s a bit too sharp now. So I’m going to go to ‘edit’ and ‘fade sharpen’. This is a unique thing that Photoshop offers to fade an effect or filter you just applied. People should become familiarized with this tool because it can help out a lot when you’re making images or touching up photos.

I want to fade it to about 50%. Now, you can still see that there is some effect but it’s not as intense as it was. So I can show you a before and after photo. What I’m going to do is I’m going to duplicate the original layer. You can do this by hitting Command-J on your keyboard, or if you’re on Windows, Ctrl-J. Or you can right click the image and just choose ‘duplicate layer’ or you can do my method and just drag it down to the new layer icon, and it will make a background copy.

Now, I’m going to rename this ‘color’ just because that’s what we’re going to fix with it, and it’s a pretty basic step on how we’re going to do this. So go to image, adjustments, and this is something you’ve probably not very much. I use it every now and then, but I usually stay away from it. Choose ‘replace color’. Now, this is a different sort of menu box. Not many people are familiar with this dialog, so I’m going to show you how it works.

You have a few color pickers up here and an adjustment for fuzziness. You have a ‘selection’ and ‘image’ here and your hue and saturation replacements. So what you want to do is make sure you have the first eyedropper selected and then choose the blue area around here, probably the light blue area works best. And then, you’ll see this image appear here, such as this silhouette. Depending on how much light is in your image, you need to adjust the fuzziness. I find the best way to adjust it is to bring it up around 100 depending on how much color that you’re editing is in the image.

Since we have a lot of blue here, I don’t want the girl affected too much, so I’m going to bring the fuzziness up to about 110. Now, you can see the girl is all black, and so is some of the floor. This is the area that will not be affected by our change.

Now, to change the color of the blue, all you need to do—you see hue, saturation, and lightness. Most people know that this is to adjust the colors. All you’re going to need to do is adjust these slider bars. So I’m going to turn the saturation down and then I’m going to turn the lightness down to about minus 35 to minus 45, and then I’m going to adjust the hue. This will change the color depending on how far you drag the slider. I like the orange color but I’d still like it if a lot of the color was taken out.

So I’m going to reduce the saturation even more to about minus 85 or minus 90, that’s a good bet. If you still want to make it darker, of course, you can bring it down. The lightness is what controls how much light is actually hitting the areas that are black. It’s a bit confusing, I know, and it will take time for you guys to get used to this tool. I know it’s a big change for me from the basic tools that I used to use, but this tutorial was mainly to show you this tool. It wasn’t meant to show off how to make a crazy effect or a cool logo. It’s just to get you used with more tools in Photoshop that can help you along the way because one day, you might need to use this tool and because of this tutorial, you’ll know what it does even a little bit better.

Thanks for watching guys.