Do you ever have a layout you are working on and you think you have the perfect element only to realize that it’s not the color that you want? So, you put it away and start looking for something else, but nothing is exactly like the one you had in mind? Well, stop putting it away and just change the color! Yep, changing colors? It’s not just for designers! 
)
First, I made these flowers for you using my Blissful Blooms 1 & 2 commercial use. You can practice changing colors on them if you would like!
Download – Remember don’t give your friends the direct download link, send them here to get the goodies themselves!
Let’s get started! First, unzip your flowers and open up one of them in PSP.
There are 2 very simple ways to change your color:
(Images are clickable to see full size) When you go to Adjust in your toolbar, you see Hue and Saturation. Hover over that and you see Colorize and below that hue/saturation/lightness. Click on Colorize.
Your hue setting changes the color while the saturation is how much color will actually be allowed to show through. If you saturation is very high, you’ll have a very bright color. If it’s lower, you’ll have a more muted shade. Play around with those sliders! )
Another way to change it is to go back up to adjust – hue and saturation – hue/saturation/lightness. Again, you can play with all of the sliders here. The top one for hue (make sure colorize is ticked) changes your color. Where saturation again is how much of that color is coming through. Lightness makes it – ta da – lighter and darker. Be careful with going to light, you can lose some details. Play around with these settings for a bit! )
Now, we’re going to get a little more fancy. Sometimes you can’t get exactly the shade you want to use, so what do you do? Well, I’ll show you!
First, we’re going to turn the image to gray. Now, there are two ways to do it, and I use both depending on what look I want to get. We’ll go with the one I use most often first.
Go up to adjust, color, channel mixer
With monochrome checked, I usually leave all of the sliders the same except for constant. I play with it to get the right shade of gray that I am looking for. (It makes a difference because when you lay your overlay, the darker the shade of gray, the darker the color will appear.) Now, you want to be careful with going too dark or too light because you will just get a big splotch of black or white with no detail. (I also use this for word art when it comes in black, that way I can lay an overlay over it and change the color of the word art to match my page.)
Now, you want to select your flower. There are two ways to do this, you can either use your magic want and select outside your flower, then go to selections and invert or you can use the float method. I use keyboard shortcuts. To select this, I use CTRL + A, CTRL + F, CTRL + SHIFT + F. (Or go up to your tool bar, select – all – float – defloat)
Now, add a new raster layer. You can either use the button that is shown above, or right click on your layers pallet and add new raster layer.
Set your color to what you want your flower to end up as. Pick your paint bucket (Flood fill). And fill the emtpy layer (where you have selected)
Now, play with your blend settings. It’s the drop down box right above your layers, usually says normal in it until you play around.
I forgot to do a screen shot of what it looks like on overlay. Oh well, click on overlay which is one I use a lot! See how the color kind of melts into your image? Very cool effect! I use Overlay, Burn, Screen, Hard and soft light, and color the most probably.
That’s it. Merge your image visible once you have the overlay/blend setting the way you like. You can even adjust the opacity in the box above the blend settings. Now, you can copy and paste it onto your layout! (Like most of my tutorials, when you get more experienced, you can do this right on your layout.)
Now, I told you there was another way to change the element to gray.
Go to Image and then grayscale
voila, instant gray.
But, now you need to change the color depth so that you can use color.
Go up to Image, Increase Color Depth, RGB – 16bits/channel
Now you can follow all of the other steps above. The reason I use the other method usually is so I can change the shade of gray that I am using.
Alright, that’s it from me! Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Have a great weekend!
