Adobe Photoshop has been used by digital artists worldwide, but its price can be prohibitive for non-professional users, and that is where Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 comes into the picture.

This method isn't the best for more intricate details in your image. It's super easy and quick to get an accurate color you want. Once everything looks the way you want it, change your layer's blending mode to Hue and voila! To do this, simply click the button at the bottom of your layers panel that has a circle inside a rectangle. You can either erase it, or what I prefer to do, is create a mask so that it's non-destructive and I can easily go back. If you painted where you didn't want color, that's fine. Set your brush Flow to 30% and on a new layer, start brushing in the areas where you want the color. Load your brush with the color you'd like. This method won't work well if you have lots of similar colors within an image, as it will affect them all. This is a great option for more intricate color selections you don't want to manually mask. Anddd here's the fun part: start adjusting your Hue slider until it's the exact color you want-and that's it! Simply drag it so the middle part of the bar is over the color you'd like to change.Once the color you want to change in your image is completely gray, bring your saturation back up to 0. You may need to play around with the color bar at the bottom to refine the color selection. Decide what color you want to change and select the option that best fits it.Bring your saturation all the way to -100 so you can clearly see what colors are being affected. Instead of colorizing the layer as we did before, we're going to go to the dropdown menu that currently says 'Master' and select the specific color we'd like to target.In this image, I want to change the blue package to purple-but painting around all those intricate design elements on the bag would be pretty time consuming.In my Hue/Saturation panel, I'm going to drop down to the Cyans, so the only colors I'm changing are those within that cyan range. This is a great option if you want to target a specific color in an intricate image.In your layers panel, create a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. This method doesn't work well with all colors and the outcome can be somewhat unpredictable at times, depending on the color you choose and the color of your object. It's a fabulous way to get some colors that may be difficult to achieve in Hue/Saturation due to the shadow banding. Once everything looks good, set your layer blend mode to Color and you're finished! Sometimes duplicating the layer also helps achieve the rich color you're looking for. Click on that mask and start to paint the areas you don't want to be affected. This decision doesn't have to be final, because you can easily change it later :) What's nice about creating a Color Fill is that it automatically creates a mask for that layer. This will bring up the Color Picker menu.Choose what color you'd like to make your object. This is a great alternative to the Hue/Saturation layer.Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color. You may get some strange outlines/color banding in your shadow areas, so just be mindful of that. You need to be careful when it comes to changing rich, saturated colors, especially red. The reason why I love this approach is because it's non-destructive and easily changeable. Once you're satisfied with the color, use your brush on the layer mask to paint the areas where you don't want the color change to happen.

See what works best for the object you're coloring. If my object is darker, then a higher saturation looks unrealistic. Typically, the lighter the object, the more I need to saturate my color. The same goes for the opposite: if you have a darker object you need to colorize, pump in some light to those darker areas by increasing your lightness.Lastly, play around with the saturation to get the desired effect you want. If your object is a lighter shade, you may need to adjust the lightness by making your selection darker to get the richness of color you want. Toggle the box that says 'Colorize' and start adjusting the hue to the specific color you want.

To do this, simply go to your adjustments panel and add a Hue/Saturation layer. The first tried-and-true way to recolor your objects is to use the hue and saturation layer.

Adobe photoshop 5.0 merging two phtos