Photoshop Quick Tip: How to Swap Colors Between Photos

Color Matching between your photos

Have you ever felt that a photo would be perfect for a project if it only had the coloration of another? Maybe you've had a series of photos for a job and the colors should match across all of them. This is easy to do in Photoshop using a variety of methods, but recently I discovered a way that I didn't know about using the Match Color feature. In this quick tip I'll show you how simple it is, and you'll most likely be adding this little feature to your bag of design tricks. Let's dive in.

First up...

You'll need two photos. One that you like the composition, and the second that you want to match colors from. I found this photo of a church.

I'd like to match the colors of this great sunrise photo.

With both photos open in Photoshop, make the church photo the active document, and select Image | Adjustments | Match Color. A window will open allowing you to select the source document for the new colors. You can even choose a selection from the document or a specific layer. You can also fine tune the lighting and intensity under image options. The settings I used for my images are below.

Here's a look at the color matched photo.

Another example…

Here's another example. I have this photo of people in a field.

I'd like to use colors of this sunset over the ocean.

Here's a look at the field photo after applying the colors from the sunset photo.

I hope you found this little quick tip useful, and can apply it in your image editing workflow. If you have another good method of color matching, I'd love to hear about. Share your thoughts using the comment fields below.