Replacing subject colours using Paint Shop Pro

Paint Shop Pro X2 has a powerful tool dedicated to replacing a colour and its variants within any given image. This is a particularly useful tool for creative tasks, so it’s always best to know about it and how to use it effectively. Here we have a leaf that’s a mustardy yellow colour, what we want is to make the image a bit more interesting, and instead of this ochre leaf we want one that leaps out at people and makes the image catch your eye. This is a perfect task for the Colour Changer tool.

Step 1 Duplicate the background layer by right-clicking it in the Layers pane and selecting ‘Duplicate’. Rename it to ‘Coloured’ or something similar, this step is very useful for undoing mistakes, and in this task it also has other advantages that will become apparent later. We are not going to edit the original background layer in any way; this process is fully reversible and can be used to try out many different colours and effects.

Step 2 In the Tool panel select the Colour Changer tool, which is grouped with the Bucket Fill tool here. Select a colour that you think you want to use for your foreground colour in the Materials pallet, and then click the colour you want to replace in your image. Now we want to get an understanding of the tool’s options.

There are only two, but the Tolerance in particular is very important. As you can see, there is a high probability that the default settings will have you changing the colours of areas you do not want replacing such as the leaf’s shadows.

Step 3 Now we’ll have a quick play with the Tolerance bar so we get a good understanding of what it controls. This value works in pretty much the same way as it does in tools like the Magic Wand selection tool; a high value means the colour will overlay almost anything regardless of colour, and a low value means a lot of colours will remain unchanged.

We need to find the balancing point where the minimum of excess is replaced, but maintaining the best coverage. On the left of the screenshot the tolerance is set to 125 and as such all the colours have been replaced, while on the right we have a tolerance of 1.

This means that only colours almost identical to the one we originally clicked on will be changed. You need to get this slider so that the entire object is altered, whilst the surrounding areas are left unaffected as much as possible.

The Edge Softness setting is pretty self-explanatory; increase the value and the edge of the affected areas will be softened more, and vice versa.

Step 4 Once you have replaced the colour and set the tolerance so that for the most part the replacement is accurate you can start to fine-tune your colour. If your colour does not look as you expected, you can experiment with it on the fly as long as you keep the Colour Changer tool selected.

All you have to do is select a new colour on the Materials Pallet and PSP will display it instantly for your consideration, saving you a lot of unnecessary clicking.

Step 5  Once you have the colour covering just the areas you want changing as far as possible (there will undoubtedly be some remaining errors that need rectifying) you can start to correct any problematic areas. In my image these are the areas underneath the leaf that are coloured by its reflection on the rock, and the discoloured area under the rock in the top right.

We are going to use a Layer Mask to hide the areas that have been coloured by accident. Right-click the layer you created when you duplicated the background, which now contains the re-coloured version of your object, and select New Mask Layer>Show All. T

he Layer Mask will be the new, white layer that appears within the newly formed group; it’s easily identified by its name and the small icon that’s presumably meant to be a mask above the Visibility button.

Step 6 Now use a black Brush tool to paint the Layer Mask black wherever you wish to make the coloured layer transparent. This is why duplicating the layer at the beginning was so useful; we can now selectively hide parts of the front layer to display the original colours instead, and if we make any mistakes we can bring back any area we want to display again by painting that part of the Mask white, which you cannot do as easily if you were to use the Eraser tool or a similarly destructive editing technique.