how to change Background color in Photoshop

Changing background color in photoshop isn't a difficult job, depending upon the Image, we can do it quite efficiently if we follow step by step procedure. Whenever we cut out passport size Image from a photo, to make a passport size photograph, we must change the background with uniform color.

When we have a picture editing software like photoshop, we can do nearly everything including ' change background color in photoshop'. Photoshop is really a great software to edit photos. But you have to remember that every software has some limitations also. You also have to remember that some photos are easy to edit and some are not i.e in some cases it is really difficult and may take some time to select the background manually. I know that you are keen to know how to change background color in Photoshop, but to change the background color you have to select background first. I was talking about the limitations of the software that is because Photoshop does not has it's own intelligence to detect the background in an image but it can detect color difference quite efficiently. you can watch this video tutorial!

Select the Background first

Background of the image selected

There are two options to select background. The easy and automatic option is quite effective for clearly different color backgrounds for example if we take an image of a red ball in front of a clear blue curtain. The red color is quite different from blue color, here we can easily select the background by magical wand tool. Just select the tool from tool car and click on the blue background, photoshop will automatically select the blue background, but if you take a picture of green ball in the play ground it will be difficult to select background automatically. You have to use othe selections tools such as magnetic or even polygonal lasso tool. In this particular case you can choose the elliptical marquee tool because the ball is round shaped. Take elliptical marquee tool and select the ball first and then right click on the selection and choose inverse selection option from the menu. In this case it is a privillege to get a round shaped object, but it will not happen everytime, specially if we get photos of humans or even animals, nothing much to say about it, you can understand. Suppose we have a passport size photo of a person standing in front of a blue or green curtain, as I mentioned earlier it is easy to select the background by magical wand tool, but if not so !. For example if the person is standing in front of a multi color wall or just a natural scene then it will be much more difficult. But not so difficult for professionals. We can use polygonal lasso tool if magnetic lasso tool does not work.

Now change Background Color in Photoshop

Background color has been changed

After selecting the background now, you can learn how to change background color in photoshop. There are so many options to do that.

1) Just press alt+del to fill the background with foreground color or ctrl+del to fill the background with background color obviously you have to change the background and background before applying this process, by default foreground color is white and background color is black.

2) Just but the background by pressing del keypad, but before that make sure that you are working in a new layer or the layer is not lock. If you were working with the background without creating a new layer you can contest the background into a layer by double clicking the background, if any pop up option appear hit ok, now we have a proper cut out of an image that may be a photo a person or anything else. Just take another canvas edit > fill > foreground color and then put the cut out image in it.

3) It is also possible to change color through channel mixes, color balance or hue / saturation. The hue / saturation option is best for new as well as advance users. You can even change the background color if it is not a single colored background. Go to image > adjustments > hue / saturation. Adjust hue to change color, saturation to adjust color saturation. Check the color radio bottom to change multi color tone into single color tone, move the scroll bar to get appropriate result. You'll notice that the color of the background is also changing according to the hue saturation scroll bar.