One question I often get asked is how to change background colors when designing in Photoshop. It’s very simple and a great technique for adding variety to an album design. One of the main reasons I wrote my own program to work in Photoshop is because Adobe has put everything, including the kitchen sink, in it. While Photoshop can be a bit quirky to design with at times, with the right tools under the hood, you can design extremely fast and the possibilities are limitless.
In August and September our studio is extremely busy with High School seniors. This year, albums have been extremely popular. The vast majority of our clients have chosen packages that include albums. I’ll be demonstrating how to pull out a color from a photo and use that color as the back ground color.
Here is stage one of the design with a white background.
The white background really didn’t fit these photos, so I tried a black background.
The black background felt too dark here. Personally, I prefer a very simple style and black and white are my first choices for backgrounds.
For this layout, I want decided to sample the color of the steps behind the boy and use that as the background. This is the process for this simple technique.
- Click on the foreground color. (The black swatch on the left side of this screen shot at the bottom of the Photoshop toolbar.
- You’ll be greeted with the color picker.
- Click on a color you like in the photo.
- You can then drag around on the color picker to fine-tune the color to your liking. In general, I find that I need to go darker. Colors in a photo appear darker than they are individually, and I find that by making the background color a bit darker, the color ‘appears’ to match better.
- Select the background layer (as in the screen shot below).
- Click alt+delete (or option+delete on Mac keyboards)
- And you are done, now you have a color background that matches a color in your photo.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tip. I use this technique sparingly, trying to keep the album design consistent. I find that too many colors, especially if they are wildly different, throughout the layout takes away from the continuity of the album.
Have fun designing. If you would like to try out color backgrounds or other fun techniques in Photoshop, feel free to download the free trial of the Fundy Album Builder.
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5 Comments at "How-To Color Backgrounds"
Cool tip, I will give it a try
[...] Make sure your foreground color is the same color as the background. (If you are unsure about how to do this please see my previous post here.) [...]
[...] I place the same image in both openings. Then on the “echo” image I place a color overlay or a texture, to give it a sense of difference. In this particular design, I sampled the background (see this how-to). [...]
[...] HOW-TO COLOR ALBUM BACKGROUNDS [...]
This works great, but note the phrase ‘use sparingly’.
Don’t overdue it unless you want to overdo it.
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