Change to exact hex color on image

Question

I am trying to change the color of this image in photoshop with this color: #1B2D40 I followed the tutorials on this post: Changing hex color of a graphic,

However, this didn't seem to work to replace the color exactly because of the white and black shadows in this image. How do I change the color without affecting the shading?

Click here for full size

Answer 1

1. Select the Background Eraser tool, set tolerance to around 22%, mouse over a blue area, and click and hold the mouse button down, and erase over the entire image without letting go. This will erase all pixels except the bevel
2. Add a layer underneath, and fill with the required colour
3. Add a Curves adjustment layer, clip it to the original image layer, and make a nice curve in it as shown.

Example

Answer 2

There should be some light and shadows - I guess you do not want a flat solid rectangle filled by #1b2d40.

One idea is to insert light and shadow to a flat solid layer of the wanted color just in the areas which make it have those relief edges. Blending mode Hard Light can as well insert and subtract light, so we prepare a masked grey layer "Relief" which brightens and darkens only the edges:

Making the "Relief" starts by making a desaturated version of the original and by marking how much different points differ from the average:

There's a desaturated version of the original and its duplicate which has got filtering Blur > Average and blending mode Difference. On the top there's a Curves layer which stretches the contrast from black to white. NOTE: some grey must still stay, it cannot be too steep curve!

We use the result as "Shading Mask". We duplicate top three layers and merge the duplicates. The average layer can be deleted. We reuse the adjustment layer and the desaturated layer to make a good contrast version which can be used to give the edges to the wanted color layer:

The "Shading Mask" layer is copied to the layer mask of the desaturated layer (see NOTE2).

Desaturated layer has blending mode Hard Light.

The curves adjustment layer has "the next layer only" switch ON. The curve is adjusted for good looking contrast purely visually. In the beginning the adjustment layer was merged with the desaturated layer to keep the story simple-looking. The merged layer was named to "Relief".

NOTE2: If you insert a layer mask and Alt+Click the mask icon in the Layers panel you get the mask on the screen for edits. You should copy and paste the prepared layer "Shading Mask".