Using Colorize

in Adobe® Photoshop® Elements

What do you do when you have an embellishment that you want to use with your scrapbook page, but the embellishment isn’t the color you want? It’s easy to change the color of embellishments, alpha characters or even digital papers using the Colorize feature in Photoshop Elements.

I’ll show you how to use Colorize through an example.

Our Hats off to the Graduate Embellishment Kit includes silver numeric characters that can be used to add dates, years, or ages, to embellish your digital scrapbook page.

Below is a sample of how these numbers can be used to add a class year to a graduation page:

But you’ll notice that the class year in our sample above shows as gold, not silver like the numbers included in the kit. How did we do that?

Well, just because an element is a particular color, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way!

To change the color of our numbers from silver to gold we used Photoshop’s colorize function. Let me show you how!

These instructions assume that you know how to work with and add elements to Quickpages. If you need help with the basics of working with Quickpages, be sure to check out our video tutorials in the Learning Center.

For our digital scrapbooking page, we’re using a page from the Hats off to the Graduate Quickpage Set. We have already added a picture, the “Class of” text and a sticker embellishment. Now, we want to use the number characters from the Hats off to the Graduate Embellishment Kit to show the class year, 2010 on our page.

The first thing to do is pull all of the number characters needed onto the digital scrapbook page.

After pulling the numbers onto the digital scrapbook page, each number character will be on its own layer and you’ll see each of these layers in the your layers palette. In the screen shot below, I renamed the layers for the number character each contains:

With the characters still each on their own layer, resize and position the numbers:

Once you have your numbers resized and positioned the way you want, merge the layers with the numbers together. To do this, select all of these layers in the layers palette by clicking on the first number layer and then shift-clicking on the last. You’ll know which layers you have selected by seeing which are highlighted:

Now, to merge these layers, right click on any of the selected layers and choose ‘Merge Layers’ from the fly-out menu:

All of your number characters will now be on one layer. I renamed that layer to ’2010′:

 

Now, set your foreground color to the color that you want your numbers to be. To do this, click on the foreground color chip. When you do, your cursor will change to an eyedropper and the Color Picker Dialog box will open:

You can choose your color by selecting one in the Color Picker Dialog box or you can use the Eyedropper tool to select a color from your scrapbook page.

Here, I’m going to choose a deep gold from the stars already on our scrapbook page:

Note that it’s important that you set your foreground color before moving on to the next step.

Select the numbers (’2010′ in my example) layer by clicking on it in the layers palette. With that layer selected, add a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer by clicking on the ‘Create a new fill or adjustment layer’ icon at the bottom of the layers palette:

Then, choose ‘Hue/Saturation’ from the fly-out menu:

This will add a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer directly above the ’2010′ layer and an ‘Adjustments’ palette will open up in the palette bin.

If you don’t see the Hue/Saturation adjustment palette, choose Window>Adjustments from the top menu bar:

We’re going to use our new Hue/Saturation layer to colorize our number characters. But, if we use the adjustment layer as it is right now, any colorizing we do with it will effect all of the layers below it and that’s not what we want. We only want to use the adjustment layer for the numbers layer, the layer directly below the adjustment layer.

To fix this, we need to group the adjustment layer with the numbers layer. This is sometimes called creating a ‘Clipping Mask’. But, whatever you call, it’s really easy to do! And, once it’s done, the changes made with the adjustment layer will only effect the layer directly below it.

To group the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to the numbers layer directly below it, click on the adjustment layer and then click on the double circle icon at the bottom of the Hue/Saturation adjustment palette:

Now, it’s time to colorize our numbers!

In the Hue/Saturation palette, click to select the box next to ‘Colorize’. You’ll notice that your numbers now have a slight gold tint to them:

Now, all that’s left to do is to adjust the Saturation and Lightness sliders in the Hue/Saturation adjustment palette until the numbers are the gold color that you want. For my sample, I used a Saturation setting of 74 and a Lightness setting of -21:

I finished the numbers by adding a drop shadow and I’m done!