Change All Instances of a Colour – Photoshop

Join the Discord. Talk about Game Dev. Talk about Gaming.

If there’s a colour you want to change in multiple places in your image, this tutorial will teach you how you can do that in Photoshop with ease. I had to do that a lot with my game Puzzledorf, but also if you’re looking for a pixel art option, Pyxel Edit is a great program that works in similar ways to Photoshop.

There are 2 ways to do this in Photoshop. This tutorial is aimed at Pixel Art.

Replace Colour

1. Open your image in Photoshop
2. Go to the ‘Image’ tab at the top File Menu, then go to ‘Adjustments > Replace Colour’
3. Make sure the option ‘Selection’ is selected in the dialog box
   
4. Click the box next to ‘Colour’ and pick the colour you want to change on your image. It will only affect the colours on the current layer
   
5. Have the colour picker set to normal (top left of the dialog box)
   
6. Modify the hue, saturation and lightness to experiment with different colours
   
7. Look at your image behind the dialog box for a preview
8. Press ‘OK’ when you’re done

Fill Tool

1. Open your image in Photoshop
2. Select the Fill Tool / Paint Bucket
   
3. At the top beneath the file menu, we need to change some options. Set to ‘Foreground’
   
4. Set ‘Mode’ to ‘Normal’
5. Set ‘Tolerance’ to 1
6. Turn off ‘Anti-alias’
7. Turn off ‘Contiguous’
8. Turn on or off the option for all layers – I usually keep it off and just work on one layer at a time
9. Choose the colour you want to apply
   
10. Apply the paint bucket to the colour on the image you want to change

Explanations of some of the Fill Tool Options

Tolerance

Having the tolerance set to 1 makes it only affect colours of the specific shade / tone you want to change. The higher the number, the more similar shades and tones will be affected. I always set it to 1 for pixel art.

Anti-alias

Anti-alias causes a bleed effect. If you used it on Pixel Art, it would create faded edges around your work.

Contiguous

Turning contiguous off means you will change all instances of that colour on the layer you’re on. Turning it on, the default, means you will only change the instance you’ve clicked on. Try it out.

Summary

I most often use the Fill Tool. I don’t use the Replace Colour method regularly. The Fill Tool method is best if you know what colour you want to use. The Replace Colour method is best if you want to experiment with the colours until something grabs you.