Selective Color Tutorial for Adobe Photoshop

Use Photoshop to select single colors in an image.

When you are working on an image or graphic, one of the most important parts of the process is being able to make reliable selections. This allows you to protect those sections you don't want to change from any alterations you make to the rest of the image. If you are performing this editing using Adobe Photoshop, there are many different ways of making a selection on the canvas. For example, if you have a particular section or object in the image that is a single color, Photoshop makes it easy to select this color.

Instructions

1. Load the image that you want to work with onto your computer.

2. Open Photoshop. Select "File" from the menu and click "Open." In the dialog that appears, locate the file you loaded and open it.

3. Go to the toolbar on the left and choose the "Magic Wand" selection tool. Go to the tool options near the top and click on "Contiguous" if you want to select only a single piece of the particular color you pick. If you want to select all of that color in the image, leave "Contiguous" turned off.

4. Click on the color that you want to select in the canvas. If the tool doesn't select all of the color, change the "Tolerance" level of the tool in the options at the top and try again.

5. Make whatever changes you want to make to the selected color. Select "File" and click "Save As." In the dialog that pops up, name your file and save it as a high resolution JPEG.

References

• UNC Health Sciences Library: Getting Started with Photoshop