The Blend Modes

The reason the Color Replacement Tool is able to paint a new color over an object or an area of a photo without losing the texture detail is because it uses blend modes to blend the new color in with the image. There's four blend modes to choose from (Hue, Saturation, Color, and Luminosity), all of which can be selected from the Mode option in the Options Bar. The default blend mode is Color:

If you've ever taken a Color Theory 101 class, you probably know that what most of us think of as the color of an object is really a combination of three things - hue, saturation and brightness. Each of the four blend modes we can select for the Color Replacement Tool will change which of these three aspects of the original color will be affected.

Hue: The Hue blend mode will change only the basic color itself. It will not change the saturation or brightness of the original color. This mode is useful for images where the colors are not very intense and will usually produce very subtle changes.

Saturation: The Saturation blend mode changes only the saturation of the original color. The hue and brightness are not affected. This is useful for reducing the intensity of a color, or even removing color completely.

Color: Color is the default blend mode and will change both the hue and saturation. The brightness will remain unchanged. This is the blend mode you'll use most often.

Luminosity: Finally, the Luminosity blend mode will simply match the brightness of the original color to the brightness of the new color. Hue and saturation are unaffected.

In this photo below, an orange balloon seems ready to split from the group and fly off on its own adventure into the sky:

One way to make the balloon stand out even more from the others in the image might be to reduce the color saturation of some of the other balloons below it. I don't want to change the actual color of the balloons, just the intensity of them. To do that, with the Color Replacement Tool selected, I'll change my blend mode option in the Options Bar to Saturation:

If I wanted to completely desaturate the balloons, removing their color entirely, I'd set my Foreground color to either black, white or any shade of gray, but since I want a more subtle effect, I'll just sample one of the less saturated colors in the image by holding down my Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key to temporarily switch to the Eyedropper Tool, then I'll click on the color I want. I'll choose a less saturated yellow. The color itself makes no difference since the Saturation blend mode won't change any of the original colors. It will only affect the saturation:

With a less saturated color now set as my Foreground color and my blend mode set to Saturation, I'll simply paint over any balloons that need their saturation level reduced, adjusting my brush size with the left and right bracket keys on the keyboard and changing the Tolerance value in the Options Bar as needed. Here, we can see the difference in color saturation as I paint over one of the other orange balloons:

I'll continue painting over any other balloons that need their color saturation reduced. Here's the completed result:

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The Brightness Problem

There's one situation, unfortunately, where the Color Replacement Tool tends to fail miserably, and that's when there's a big difference in brightness between the original color in the image and the color you want to replace it with. Let's say I wanted to replace the orange in that one balloon we've been focusing on with the dark purple color from one of the other balloons. From everything we've seen so far, it should be simple enough, right?

First, I'll set the colors in the image back to what they were originally by going up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choosing the Revert command. Then, with the Color Replacement Tool selected, I'll hold down my Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and click on one of the purple balloons to sample the color:

I'll set my blend mode in the Options Bar back to Color, the default setting. Then, I'll paint over the orange balloon to change its color to dark purple. Here's the result:

Hmm. It's definitely purple, but it doesn't quite look like the other purple balloons, does it? The problem is that it's much lighter than the other purple balloons, and that's because the original color of the balloon was much lighter than the dark purple color I sampled. The Color blend mode had no effect on the brightness. In fact, the only blend mode that does change the brightness is Luminosity, so let's try that one. I'll change my blend mode in the Options Bar to Luminosity:

I'll undo my steps to change the balloon back to its original orange color, and then, with my blend mode set to Luminosity this time, I'll try replacing the orange with dark purple:

I think it's safe to say that things did not go well. The Luminosity blend mode definitely made the balloon darker, but it's still orange, and now most of the texture detail is gone! It barely looks like a balloon at all at this point, and this is the problem we face with the Color Replacement Tool. It works great for simple tasks where you only need to change the hue and/or saturation of a color, but if there's too much of a difference in brightness values between the original color and the new color, you'll probably want to try something else.

Let's finish things off with a quick look at the remaining few options for the Color Replacement Tool, which we'll do next!

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