Technique 21: Recoloring with Fill Layers
Save Time By
Applying a fill layer
Cheating using Hue/Saturation
One day, you’re working on an advertising project for a client who just has to include a particular photograph in the ad. The client says that the photo is really great except that the shirt the model is wearing is the wrong color or the background clashes with the furniture or the flowers should be yellow, not pink! All you have to do is say, “No problem,” get to your computer, and then use Photoshop to recolor the area with a fill layer.Fill layers are used to recolor a layer or selection by using another layer instead of applying the correction to the actual image and altering the image pixels forever. This layer-based recoloring leads to an amazing amount of flexibility. You can always change the color without changing the image itself. Also, because the area being recolored is defined with a layer mask, you can adjust the layer mask anytime that you need to include or exclude an area. (If you find that you need to alter the layer mask after you create a fill layer, turn to Technique 49 for a complete discussion on working with layer masks.)This technique takes you through recoloring an image with a fill layer. It may sound a bit scary or difficult, but it’s not! Using fill layers is really easy. After you try them out, you discover just how flexible they are.