This is done from the menu: Image–> Mode–> RGB Color, as shown below. To make changes (other than swapping colors which is described below) you should change the image back to RGB color mode. Note: In Photoshop Elements (and Photoshop) many image editing functions don’t work if your image is in Indexed Color mode. If you like the results, click OK and your photo is now color reduced, as shown below. Unfortunately, if you don’t like the results, the only thing to do is select Cancel and start over from the beginning. Since the Preview button was checked in step 3, this will show a preview of your color-reduced photo. When you think you’ve selected enough colors, click OK to close the Color Table. Here is the color table with 22 colors selected from the photo. Using more colors gives a more accurate representation of the photo, but also makes changing colors later more work.ĩ. Repeat steps 7 and 7a to select additional colors from the photo. Do NOT click OK to close the Color Table.Ĩ. Click OK in the color picker window and the new color will replace the black square in the Color Table. This color will then be in the color picker window.ħa. With the mouse, go the to main photo and click on one of the colors you want to keep. Click on one of the black squares in the color table, and the color picker window opens again. We need to replace some of these black squares with the colors we’ll have in the final color-reduced image.ħ. Now the Color Table is filled with black squares. Do NOT click OK to close the color table.Ħ. Then click the OK button twice to close the color picker. Select black for the color, either by clicking in the lower left portion of the color window, or by typing 0 (zero) into the R and G and B boxes. This opens the color picker window shown here. To do this, click on the color in the upper left corner of the color table, and drag your mouse down to the lower right corner so that all the color boxes are selected.ĥa. Next is to select all the colors in this color table and change them to black. The photo has been reduced to these 256 colors, but we want to reduce the number of colors much further. This will open up a color table (shown to the right) with 256 colors from the photo. If this happens, reselect “Local(Adaptive)” and change the number of colors (say to 255) and then change the Palette again to “Custom”.Ĥ. Note for Photoshop only: sometimes the “Custom” option is grayed out. Without closing the “Indexed Color” pop-up box, click on the Palette drop-down list again and change the selection to Custom (see picture to the right).
Make sure the settings are set as follows:ģa. This will bring up the pop-up box outlined in green below. From the menu, select the command Image–> Mode –> Indexed Color as shown below. If your file has multiple layers, they will be merged when you convert it to Indexed Color mode.
The next step is to convert the photo to what Photoshop calls the Indexed Color mode. Often when first opening a file, the layer will be locked (indicated by the padlock icon on the layer–circled here.) To unlock the layer, click on the padlock icon in the menu (arrow) and the padlock next to the layer will go away.ģ. It’s always a good idea to work on a copy of your image and keep the original image unchanged.Ģ. Note that this photo is in RGB color mode. reduce the number of colors to around a couple dozen by picking the main colors from the photoġ.convert the photo to the ‘indexed color’ mode with 256 colors.The basic process is just a couple of steps: I’ll also note the differences for Photoshop since there are some variations. In this post, I’ll go through the steps to color reduce a photo in Photoshop Elements. In a previous post I talked about why you might want to color reduce a design, even in the age of digital printing.
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