My gorgeous niece (that’s her below), bleached all her hair a couple of weeks ago with a plan to pink it up.

Here’s how Photoshop can help your identity enforcing teen make up their mind whether pink (or blue) is really for them.

First of all open your photo in Photoshop and create a duplicate layer (right click on the background layer and select duplicate layer or Cmd/Ctrl – J).

Always a good idea to work on a copy so make sure the new layer is selected then use the Menu options Image-Adjustment-Replace Colour to open the Replace Colour menu.

I always start of with my Fuzziness set to 40.

Next, click on the area of the photo you want to adjust the colour of. Here it’s her hair and it’s various shades so clicking on one part doesn’t select nearly enough so I need to hold down the Shift key and kept clicking all over her hair (adding to the selection) until it’s all selected. It also selects most of her face but that’s not a problem since I will be removing it later.

Then play with the sliders til you get the colour you want. Here I shunted the hue way down into the blue and bumped up the saturation.

Next you need to remove the adjustment from the bits of the photo you don’t want changed. Make sure the adjusted layer is selected and add a Mask.

Then switch to the paintbrush tool and taking a soft black brush at 100% opacity and flow…

… paint over the bits of colour you want removed.

Your bottom layer, the uncoloured one, will be revealed on the bits you paint black and the areas of the mask that remain white will be the top, coloured layer.

If you go over the lines a bit just switch to a white brush to paint the top layer back in.

Nearer the edges zoom in and make your brush smaller for the wee details.

This was a bit BLUE so last thing I did was adjust the opacity of the layer….

At 40% it was a bit silver – but quite cool.

I settled on 85%.

A lovely baby blue.

Since the mask is already defined it’s easy now to try a few alternatives.

Click back on the duplicate layer (not the mask, the colourized layer), go back to the Replace Colour Menu. Select the hair again (Shift and click) and slide those sliders.

Her face stays natural since the mask is already defined.

She decided on pink in the end, but maybe bluey/turquoise next time?