How can I easily swap colors / swap channels in Photoshop?

Question

Back before I could afford a Mac I used a PC (when Windows XP ruled the earth). At that time I couldn't afford Photoshop either. So I had a WinXP box with Irfanview installed - and I thought that was pretty cool.

Now I have a Mac and PhotoShop but I can't figure out how to do one of the things Irfanview did so easily - swap colors / channels:

What it Does

Using those menu items you could take an image like this one:

and make it look like this:

or like this:

1. How can I do something similar in Photoshop? It seems like it might be really complicated.
2. What if I wanted to make that button another color besides one of the primary channel swaps - like a maroon or aqua - what is the best way to do that in Photoshop?
3. Shouldn't it be especially easy if the image has a (kind of) grayscale background?

ps: Irfanview does not run on Mac without WineBottler or something like that which I don't really want to run.

Answer 1

#1

Similar to Joonas' comment...

Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Channel Mixer Then simply pick a color channel from the Output Channel drop down and change it's values below with the fields/sliders.

To swap red and green, set red to 0 and green to +100 for the red Output channel and set red to +100 and green to 0 for the Green Output Channel.

You can configure this then save the setting as an option for quick access in the future.

This may seem more complicated, but it's really not. It is simply more versatile. If you want immediate jumps to channel swaps simply save the mixer presets and the immediate jumps are there. But if you want only slight alterations, that's possible as well.

-

#2

Just as Joonas suggests... Layer > New Adjustment layer > Hue/Saturation You can then simply tick the "Colorize" option and then play with the Hue Slider.

-

#3

Yes in general. Adding color to a greyscale image is always easier than trying to adjust color in a color image.