How to Use Photoshop "Magic Color Change" Action to Change a Color

One of the things we love about Photoshop is the ability to manipulate a photo to our artistic vision.  Now, with the 'Magic Color Change' action, which is included in the Pure Color Workflow Collection, it's super simple to change a color in Photoshop to match your vision!  

Hey guys. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use the magic color change action in your Pretty Actions Pure Color Workflow Collection. Let's go ahead and scroll down to our brushes here. I'm going to select the magic color change action, and down at the bottom of my actions panel, I'm going to select and press the play button. You'll see a few prompts appear on your screen, press okay. Now I have my color picker and color blocks automatically appear on my screen here. Let's see, we've got baby boy and mom. Mom had not arrived wanting to get her pictures taken, however, I did convince her to get a few. If this is a baby girl I may have changed the wrap to purple, but since he's a boy, I'm going to go ahead and change her shirt color to match his wrap here. I'm going to go ahead and use my color picker, which again, is automatically brought up through the action.

I'm going to pick a nice gray in the mid tones, so not too light and not too dark. I am going to press okay. Keep in my mind, you can go back later on and change the color after you paint it on if you're finding that it really isn't what you had wanted. Okay, so the action has run. I want to make sure I have my brush selected. Over here in the tools panel I'm going to right click. If you don't see it, click on your brush tool. Make sure your brush opacity at the top of your screen here you'll see, you want that to be at 100%. White should be your foreground color. Again, that's automatically selected through the action. And ... oops let me close that [inaudible 00:02:18] here. Okay. And I'm just going to start painting the gray onto her shirt, so we can have that match the wrap in the image.

Okay, and I'm just going to zoom through this here for time purposes. Let me go and grab the brush. I make my brush larger and smaller with the left and right bracket keys. Okay. Now if you're having trouble seeing if you completely painted over an areas, you can press the back slash key. Notice everything in red has not been painted. Everything in color, which is the gray, I noticed I missed a spot there, is what you've already painted. Now say you make a mistake and you go outside the line like I did there. That's okay, bring it back to the foreground color and go ahead and just paint over that, and that will remove what you had just done.

Okay, so I'm just about done painting the gray onto her shirt here. Again, I'm just kind of zooming through this. Let me just go over here. Got a little bit more on the left hand side. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. I'm just going to zoom back out. And let's see. Okay, so now I have the ability to change the color, or make her shirt lighter or darker. What I'm going to do is open the action itself. Now if you have Photoshop Elements you'll want to scroll to the bottom of your collection and run the open folder PSE action, and that will open the folder for you. Okay. I've got that open. Now here's the pick new color layer. You can see the little color box that's gray. If you double click on that, you can just click around and pick different tones of gray, you can change the color, and you can see that live instead of when you're running the action you don't see it until you paint it on.

So now you can go in and make those adjustments. If it's not quite what you had wanted, I can can go back to ... I'm having a deep color tone over here. It's nice and bright, so let's bring it back down to a more muted color. You can just click around and find the color that works best for you. You know press cancel, it still went to gray, and I'm just going to brighten this up a little bit by clicking on the bright and lighter. Going up here to capacity and I can just bring that up. The photo itself is nice and bright and airy, so I want her shirt to really match that, okay. I can go down to darken and darken the image as well. Not the image, rather, but the shirt where we undone. Use the color change action. So I'm really liking the way that looks. I'm going to go ahead and close my folder. I'm done. I can flatten my image and then move on from here.

Also if you do have the LUXE Newborn Collection there's a magic blanket color change action. While this action is not exactly the same, it does work ... it has the same layers within it as far as being able to darken, brighten, and pick a new color, so you'll be able to utilize this tutorial for that action as well. 

Watch in this video tutorial as we take you step by step through the process and show you how to choose a color (and easily change it again later without re-running the action!).  I will even show you how to make the color lighter or darker to match your envisioned look.  Enjoy and happy editing!

Be sure to check out all of Pretty Actions great Photoshop Actions Collections here and Overlay collections here.