Change Color in Image
Recolour a shirt, a car or a logo in seconds — the shading stays, nothing is uploaded.
Try before you buy.
- Free preview: the result at preview size (up to 640 pixels), with a MySmartCoPilot watermark across it.
- Locked until you unlock it: download and copy.
- Unlock: Pro pass, ₹179 for 30 days or ₹79 for 1 week, a one-time payment that never renews. Unlock: Pro pass, $5.99 for 30 days or $2.99 for 1 week, a one-time payment that never renews.
Ways to unlock shows how to get the full result.
Printing this result is locked in the free preview.
Photo
Click the colour you want to change.
Making the full-size picture…
Keyboard: P, B, E and M choose a tool. With the picture focused, the arrow keys move a cursor (Shift: faster) and Enter picks or paints there; + and − zoom; Ctrl+Z undoes.
Locked in the free preview. Opens the ways to unlock this result.
Locked in the free preview. Batch runs unlock with a pass.
Locked in the free preview. Query results unlock with a pass.
About the Change Color in Image
Click a colour in your photo — a red car, a black T-shirt, a blue wall, the green of a logo — choose a new colour, and every pixel of that colour changes while its shadows, highlights and texture stay. The selection uses CIEDE2000 (ΔE00), the colour-difference formula of the CIE (the International Commission on Illumination) for how different two colours look, so a tolerance of 15 means “colours that look about this close”, not an arbitrary RGB distance. Its lighter and darker shades can be included on purpose, a soft edge blends the change into its surroundings, and What changes shows the selection as a mask while you adjust it.
When the same colour appears where it should not change, paint the area to change (then only that part changes) or an area to keep. Instead of a new colour you can also make the picked colour transparent. Undo and redo cover every pick and brush stroke. With a Pro pass the result saves at full size as PNG, JPG or WebP; without one you see it as a free preview. Everything runs in your browser; the photo never leaves your device.
How to use it
- Choose, drop or paste a photo (JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC).
- With Pick colour, click the colour to change. Add more shades of it with Adds a shade if one click does not catch everything, or type the colour as a hex code, as rgb() or as a colour name such as navy.
- Choose the new colour (or Transparent). Raise or lower Tolerance until What changes shows white exactly where the colour should change; Edge softness blends the border.
- If the colour also appears elsewhere, select Paint area and paint the part to change — or switch the brush to Area to keep and paint what must stay. Fine-tune with Lightness and Saturation.
- Pick PNG, JPG or WebP. With a Pro pass, select Download or Copy image for the full-size result; without one the result stays a free preview.
Examples
Pick the red paint, add its darkest shadow with “Adds a shade” · Tolerance 15 · New colour #2563EB
The bodywork turns blue with the same reflections and shadows. Red tail lights change too, unless you paint them as an area to keep.
Pick the shirt · Tolerance 15 · New colour #7F1D1D · Paint area: the shirt only
The shirt becomes burgundy and its folds stay visible; dark hair and shadows outside the painted area stay black.
Black has no reliable hue, so its pixels take the new colour’s hue and chroma, and the folds keep their relative lightness.
Pick #E30613 · Tolerance 25 · Edge softness 10 · New colour #0057B8 · Save as PNG
The red becomes #0057B8 (to within a level or two in each channel) and the anti-aliased edge pixels become lighter blues, so no red fringe is left. The white background stays white.
At the default tolerance of 15 the paler edge pixels would stay pink. With its lighter and darker shades included, white is about ΔE00 36 from this red, so a tolerance of 25 plus an edge softness of 10 takes in the edges but not the background.
Pick the green · Transparent · Tolerance 25 · Save as PNG
The green becomes see-through. For whole backgrounds with clean edges, the Make Background Transparent tool also removes the green tint on hair.
Common uses
- Showing a product — a car, a sofa, a dress, a phone case — in the other colours it is sold in.
- Trying a wall, door or façade colour on a photo of the room or house before buying paint.
- Changing a logo, icon or chart to new brand colours without redrawing it.
- Fixing a colour that came out wrong, such as a sign, a jersey or a uniform.
- Removing one colour from an image to make it transparent.
How the colour is selected
Each pixel is converted from sRGB to CIELAB (relative to D65, the white point of sRGB) and compared with the colours you picked using CIEDE2000, the colour-difference formula standardised by the CIE (ISO/CIE 11664-6), implemented as in the notes and test data of G. Sharma, W. Wu and E. N. Dalal and checked against all 34 of their test pairs.
- A ΔE00 of about 1 is commonly taken as the smallest difference most people can see side by side. In a photo, the shades of one object’s colour usually lie 5 to 20 apart. Other colours are usually further away, but similar ones can be as close: skin and an orange shirt, for example.
- Pixels within the tolerance change fully. Over the next edge softness units the change fades out smoothly, so anti-aliased edges and slight colour shifts blend in.
- Include its lighter and darker shades uses the formula’s parametric lightness factor kL = 2 (instead of 1), which counts lightness differences half. Shadows and highlights of the colour then stay inside the tolerance while other hues of the same lightness do not.
- With several picked colours, a pixel counts by the nearest one.
How the new colour keeps the shading
The change is made in CIELAB lightness L*, chroma C* and hue h. The reference is the average colour of what is selected (painted areas included), so it does not matter whether you clicked a highlight, a mid-tone or a shadow: that average becomes exactly the new colour, and every shade keeps its difference from it.
- Lightness: the reference’s L* moves to the new colour’s L* and every shade moves by the same amount, so a shadow 20 units darker than the paint stays 20 units darker. On the side the colour moves to, the curve eases into white (or black), so highlights are never clipped flat.
- Hue and chroma: each pixel is turned by the hue difference of the two colours and its chroma scaled by their chroma ratio, so a pale highlight stays a pale version of the new colour. When a greyish colour is made vivid, the differences within it are stretched by at most 1.5 and the rest of the new chroma is added, so photo noise and the tints of neighbouring colours do not turn into blotches.
- Black, grey and white have no hue to rotate. When the reference is near-neutral, its pixels take the new hue and gain the new chroma instead; the two methods are blended according to the reference’s chroma.
- Colours outside what a screen can show lose chroma until they fit, keeping their lightness and hue.
Keep the original lightness changes only hue and chroma. Lightness and Saturation adjust the result, and a pixel at the soft edge is blended between its old and new colour.
Getting a clean result
- If the deepest shadows or brightest highlights of the object stay unchanged, click them with Adds a shade instead of raising the tolerance: a higher tolerance also takes in other colours.
- Check What changes after each adjustment: white parts change, grey parts change partly, black parts stay.
- Logos, text and icons have anti-aliased edges, pixels half the colour and half the background. Raise Tolerance until the outline shows grey or white in What changes while the background stays black; otherwise a thin fringe of the old colour is left.
- When the same colour appears elsewhere — a red car beside a red sign — paint the car as the area to change instead of lowering the tolerance until the edges break.
- Skin is close to many reds, oranges and browns; paint people as an area to keep when recolouring warm colours.
- Save logos and graphics as PNG, photos as JPG or WebP (85–92 % quality is indistinguishable for most photos).
Limitations
- Selection is by colour, not by recognising objects: parts of the photo with the same colour change too unless you paint the area.
- Turning a very dark colour into a very light one (or the reverse) can look flat, because the photo holds little shading detail at those extremes; use Lightness to adjust.
- Reflections of other colours, motion blur and translucent fabric mix colours in one pixel, so they change only partly.
- Photos above 16 megapixels (8 on phones and tablets) are reduced to that size to fit the device’s memory, and the download has that size.
- JPG cannot store transparency, so a transparent result saves as PNG or WebP.
Privacy
On this device: nothing is sent
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
What do I get without a pass?
Without a pass, Change Color in Image shows the result at preview size (up to 640 pixels), with a MySmartCoPilot watermark across it. Until you unlock it, the result can’t be downloaded or copied. A Pro, Premium or Ultimate pass, a one-time payment that never renews, unlocks the full result. The pricing page lists the passes and their prices.
How do I change the colour of just one object?
Pick its colour, then select Paint area and paint roughly over the object as the area to change: only that part changes, and the colour selection still finds its exact edges. Paint an area to keep over anything nearby that has the same colour.
What does the tolerance number mean?
It is a CIEDE2000 colour difference (ΔE00) to the nearest picked colour. About 1 is commonly taken as the smallest difference people can see side by side; the shades of one object in a photo usually lie 5 to 20 apart. Start at the default of 15, look at What changes, and adjust — or add a missing shade with Adds a shade.
Why does the new colour look darker or lighter than the swatch in some places?
Because the shading of the photo is kept: the average colour of the selection becomes exactly the new colour, and its shadows and highlights stay darker and lighter than that. Use Lightness to move all of it, or Keep the original lightness to change only the hue.
Can I make a colour transparent instead?
Yes — choose Transparent under “Change it to” and save as PNG or WebP. For removing a whole plain background with clean edges, Make Background Transparent also cleans the fringe of the background colour around the subject.
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. The photo is decoded, recoloured and saved in your browser, on your device. The tool keeps working without a connection once the page has loaded.
Will the colours be exact for printing?
The average colour of the selection becomes the sRGB colour you chose, so a flat colour such as a logo’s becomes that colour to within a level or two of 8-bit rounding; in a photo, the shadows and highlights stay darker and lighter than it. The file is saved in sRGB. Printed colours depend on the printer, paper and colour management, so check a proof for critical brand colours.
Open-source components
This page can load these open-source components, each only when a task needs it:
- It uses libheif and libde265 under the LGPL v3, through libheif-js: licence and source code.
You may replace them with your own builds. Their licences and the credits of every library the site uses are on the open-source credits page.