If you’ve ever had the perfect composition, but not the right color you’ll find Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation adjustment very handy. Maybe you have a product shot that’s perfect in every way, except one of the colors has changed or you want to make all the daisies pink instead of yellow. It doesn’t stop there because you can also desaturate and lighten sections or colorize the entire image. Plus, it can be applied as an adjustment layer with a layer mask to show or hide the changes you want.

This effect works best with large, mostly solid areas of color in high resolution files, but it’ll still work with scattered bits of color — it’ll just take a little more finesse to get it to look right.

1. First, open an image you want to change. I choose a nice red Corvette with lots of reflections. In the layers palette click on the adjustment layer icon at the bottom and choose Hue/Saturation.  When the dialogue opens, go to the drop down menu (Edit: Master) and change it to Red. Photoshop will then select all the reds in the document based upon preset information.

2. Sometimes Photoshop doesn’t get all the colors you want so you’ll need to manually increase or decrease the color gamut to affect only the colors you want. Select the eyedropper tool with the plus sign and click on any color that needs to be changed. (In the example, there’s still some pink in the hood and side panel) If you include too much, go back with the minus eyedropper tool to remove color from the adjustment. Then drag the Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders to change the color. Don’t forget to check the preview button to see the changes as they happen.

You may have noticed the two color bars in the dialogue box. The top represents all the colors in the document, the bottom shows what changes have been made with Hue/Saturation. You’ll see three sliders, the darkest grey centers around red, the original color and just beneath that it’s blue because I told Photoshop to switch all reds to blue. The triangular sliders on the end determine how many adjoining colors Photoshop will blend. NOTE: You can also drag these sliders rather than using the eyedropper.

3. This effect creates a huge change for not too much effort. Just think of all the colors you could be changing!