One of the most impressive qualities of digital files is the ability to change colors. Let’s say that you love all of the papers in a digital kit, but they don’t match the colors of the photos you would like to use. What do you do? With real paper, there isn’t anything you can do. But, in Photoshop Elements you have the ability to alter the color of the papers.

Step 1: (fig A) The easiest way is to use an adjustment tool called Hue/Saturation which you can access by typing Ctrl+U, or by going to the Enhance Menu, and selecting Adjust Color | Adjust Hue and Saturation. (You’ll notice the shortcut shown just to the right of the Adjust He & Saturation choice.)

Step 2: (fig B) Click on the Hue slider and slowly move it to the right, and then to the left. You’ll see how easy it is to change the colors in the original paper. You can also adjust the Saturation, or intensity of the color, or the Lightness/Darkness of the color.


Step 3: If you prefer a monochromatic look, just click on the Colorize button at the bottom right of the Hue/Saturation box. The program will automatically change the image to a monochromatic version of whatever your current foreground color is, but you can easily change this by adjusting the Hue and then the Saturation and Lightness

Step 4: (Fig C, D, E, F) If you only wanted to alter one particular color on the paper, there is a way to do that as well. Let’s say that you want to remove the red from the original paper. You would select the Magic Wand Tool (W) (making sure that the “contiguous” box on the menu is unchecked, and the “tolerance” level is set to 30) and click on the red in the paper -- this will select all of the red areas of the paper, putting a marquee or ‘marching ants’ around them.

Now you can use the Eyedropper Tool (I) to select the color you want to replace the red. In this example we selected the light blue in the paper. When we clicked on the light blue with the Eyedropper Tool, it also changed the foreground color to this same light blue.

Double-click with your mouse on the Foreground Color Chip at the bottom of the Toolbox. This will bring up the color picker window. We want to change the color to a darker shade of the same color, so we click on the radio button in front of the B (for Brightness) and then move the slider down until we get the color we want. Notice that the color chip shows the new color above
with the original color below.

Now, we can switch to the Paint Bucket Tool (K) (make sure the “contiguous” box on the menu is unchecked) and fill the selected area using the new foreground color!

Original Layout

New layout with background colors changed.