Channel Mixer Colouring Effect

August 5, 2008 · Print This Article

In this Channel Mixer Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial I hope to explain how you can create the similar effect.

With the below image I wanted to create a dream like, in the past effect, and in this tutorial I will attempt to explain what I did and how you can also do it. This technique is very simple and can be used and manipulated for lots of other things.

Below you’ll see I used a motion blur - although this tutorial is on blurring, you can adapt it to change the background colour but keep the girl the same. All you have to do is think outside of the box and play.

Feel free to request something similar to this Channel Mixer Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial.

Before

After

Channel Mixer Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial - The Steps

Firstly open up the image you want to use for this tutorial (you can use the image above to try this out), if you don’t know how check this tutorial out.

Now duplicate your layer. To do this, I use a shortcut: CTRL (win) / Command (mac) + J

Then go -> Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Channel Mixer - in the tab at the very top, make sure you’ve selected “Red” and the change your settings to these:
Red: +100
Green: +172
Blue: -66
Constant: -70

Now select your middle layer (not the original and not the channel mixer layer - the other one)… then go to your layers pallet - if you look at it closely you’ll see three small tabs; Layers, Channels, Paths - Select Channels you’ll see four channel layers, just like mine here - now you can select one of the layers; I selected green but this was just because it suited the image best.

Once you select blue you’ll notice a change in your image… so then go to your image and use these shortcuts: CTRL/Command + A (selects the image) - CTRL/Command + C (copies the image) - then click the RGB layer, and then click the layers tab (before you selected “channels”)…

When you see your normal layers and your image in colour, use this shortcut CTRL/Command + V (this then pastes the blue, grayscale layer onto your colour one). You will now have three layers - 2 coloured ones and a grayscale one (your new one).

After all that, select your grayscale layer, then locate the mode and change it to Color Burn

You’ll see that the road sign isn’t readable - so I just got an eraser tool (E on your keyboard) and erased a bit of it.

Aaandddd you’re done. When you try this out on other images, I would suggest fiddling with the Channel Mixer - you may want to alter the sliders a bit to suit your image more as these settings are rather unique. I hope this Channel Mixer Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial was helpful - however if you have any questions regarding this tutorial then please leave a comment below and I’ll happily reply.