How to Remove Unwanted Colors in Adobe Photoshop

How To Remove Unwanted Colors in Adobe Photoshop | Retouching Blog + Photo Editing Tips + Design Tips

Isn't annoying when everything about your photo is perfect, except this annoying area of color that has the project onto a person or object in your photo. These colors normally come from bouncing off another colored object or light source in the room. Sometimes these bounced colors can add a cool look to a photo. This is why some photographers use photo gels on top of studio lights to add a nice color rim to an image. Other times these colors can be an eyesore to a great image, that you'll desperately want to remove. So in this tutorial, I will show you a simple and quick way to remove these unwanted colors in Photoshop. For more complex situations, advanced techniques may be required, but this method should work fine for most simple unwanted color instances. 

Watch The Video Tutorial Below:

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1. Open your image in Photoshop.

This image is actually a case where bounced colors look great on the image. In any other case, I would leave the blue on the left side of the girls face as it is; but for this tutorials I am going to remove the blue tint from her face. You can a follow along with the same image by BessiI'm using or use your own. Download this image from Pixabay here. 

How To Remove Unwanted Colors in Adobe Photoshop | Retouching Blog

2. Add a New Layer on top of the Background Layer. Set the Blending Mode to Color.

Go to Layer> New> Layer. Go to the Layers Panel and change the blending mode to Color.

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3. Sample a nearby color and paint over the unwanted color. 

Grab the paint brush, sample the color from an area near the unwanted color with the Eye Dropper Tool. Select the Paint Brush Tool and paint over the area with Opacity of 50% and a Flow of 50%. Be mindful of the skin tone variation and sample frequently. You don’t want to make the object or person look flat and lifeless. You’re just focusing on removing unwanted color. 

*Tip: You can easily sample with the Paint Brush tool selected by holding down Alt and clicking the new area you want to sample from. Once you let go of Alt the cursor will go back to the Paint Brush Tool and your new color will be sampled. 
How To Remove Unwanted Colors in Adobe Photoshop | Retouching Blog

All done! Use the slider below to see the before and after!