#recolour tutorial

I open my template in paint.net -- in this example the Zentastic Spa Day tiles -- and I have my various little windows arranged so I can get to them easily. You’ll see I also have my palettes listed in the colour wheel tool, so they are easy to access

I use the rectangle select tool to select the bottom part of my tiles -- this means whatever I do to the image it will only affect the area that is selected. Then I use the eye dropper tool, right click on the grey of the tiles to choose the secondary colour (this is important for the recolour tool to work most effectively because it references what colour you’re trying to cover up)

Next I choose the colour I want to change the bottom tiles to -- in this case white -- and make it my primary colour. Then I pick the recolour tool (you can see which one it is in my tools palette), set the tolerance to something relatively high, set the size nice and large (we don’t want to have to keep painting lots of little strokes when one or two big sweeping ones will do -- we have a lot of recolours to do after all!), and paint over the area selected by the rectangle select tool. It doesn’t matter if I go outside that area because only the area selected will be affected

Now I have by bottom tile colour I want to start recolouring the top tiles in lots of different colours. I go to edit and choose invert selection, which changes the selected area to the top tiles, meaning I can paint over them and not worry about affecting the white tiles I’ve already done

Which is exactly what I do in this next step -- using the same method as before I paint over the tiles using the recolour tool with my chosen colour as the primary colour. After I’ve saved my new png, I can roll back a couple of steps using the history palette and recolour the top tiles in the next colour in my palette, and so on, without having to do it all from scratch

A bonus panel to show how to deal with things with little details you don’t want to recolour but are fiddly to select: I want to recolour the background of this wallpaper but leave the chevron pattern white, and using something like the magic wand tool to select the areas I want to colour, while it would be effective, would be quite fiddly and time consuming. This is where the recolour tool comes into its own. By selecting a low tolerance level, the tool will only recolour pixels that closely match the secondary background colour that I’ve previously selected using the eye dropper tool (as we saw in step 2). For my Chevron Down wallpapers around 28-29 seems to be the magic number, but that will change depending on your project. I start to recolour by touching the recolour tool to the grey background first so it knows those are the pixels it wants to recolour, and as you can see it leaves the white chevron pattern completely untouched, and only my background is recoloured.

This method is great because you don’t have to rely on actions or colour matching. The recolour tool is intelligent enough that it understands what you want to recolour and it matches your primary colour near perfectly. There will be some variations in shade depending on where your recolour tool first makes landfall -- that is if you start painting on a slightly darker area your overall shade might be a bit lighter than you wanted, and if you start on a slightly lighter area it might end up overall a bit darker, so you have to be consistent with where you start painting if you’re doing several different versions of the same colour.

It might be faster to do some things if you can set up batch processes in photoshop, and in fact I do that when I want to add things like trims or panels in the same colour to many different swatches at a time. I recolour the template version in paint.net, save it, then apply it in an automated batch action to 70+ swatches in one go -- something that would be a real pain to do one-by-one. I also use photoshop to apply patterns because its define pattern options are really good.